The first time didn't count.

In the first few weeks after Operation Lazarus, it had been necessary for him to hole up in Molly's flat – after all, he couldn't very well stay with Mycroft or his parents, all of whom were bound to come under immediate and intense scrutiny by Moriarty's network, as well as Britain's not-inconsiderable gutter press. He needed a place to hide, a place to think, and Sherlock knew that Molly would comply – or at least not put up too much resistance. Without a moment's warning, she had skillfully and unquestioningly helped him to fake his death, so letting him lie low in her home seemed like a trivial added extra.

And on the first few occasions, Molly had behaved completely as he'd expected. When she wasn't offering him food or returning his laundry, neatly folded, she did her best to melt into the background. Chatted a bit, but mostly anxious to keep out of his way, to allow him to do what he needed to do. When he'd made the case for needing her bed rather than the ludicrous toddler bed in the spare room, she had baulked for a second, but then – as he'd predicted – she acquiesced. He remembered feeling a strange momentary pang of disappointment – had he wanted her to stand up to him? Holding the power in a relationship was usually advantageous and to be fought for, but Sherlock was aware that with Molly, there was something slightly uncomfortable – almost shaming - about this imbalance.

So he should have felt better when Molly finally stood her ground.

She'd come home earlier than usual, upset about something (he hadn't bothered to find out what), then seemed to deliberately ignore him while she fed the cat, made and ate a sandwich, and got ready for bed. He'd received a perfunctory 'goodnight' before she left him in the living room.

A short while later, he was slightly surprised to find her in her own bed, although he could tell from her posture – tense, taut – and her breathing, that she wasn't asleep.

"I thought we had an agreement," he began.

He noticed her shoulders shift and heard an exhale of breath that clearly denoted irritation.

"You had an agreement," she replied, without turning over to face him. "But today I need my own bed, Sherlock. There's a guest room – you're the guest."

He chose not to analyse too closely her choice of terminology.

"Can't sleep there, you know that," he reminded her. "The bed's too short, the room's too small."

"Help yourself to the sofa, then," she retorted, in a tone that Sherlock wasn't sure he'd heard from her before.

But if there was one thing he found hard to tolerate (or at least one thing near the top of the list), it was a change to the expected routine. Of course, Molly probably knew that, knew that it would irritate him. Something had changed – he didn't really care what, as long as it didn't stand in the way of him getting what he needed.

"Molly, I have spent the best part of nine hours working through a complex set of data in eight different languages, the understanding of which is going to be critical to the dismantling of Moriarty's vast and far-reaching network. It's absolutely vital that I now have the optimal conditions available to me to facilitate complete rest and to enable me to re-organise my Mind Palace."

Without waiting for her to reply, he pulled back the duvet and climbed into the bed beside her. Molly's response, he had assumed, would be to huff a bit and then vacate the bed, but she didn't budge. Instead, she pulled the duvet more tightly around her, causing an unwelcome draught down his left side.

"Molly, as a woman of science, not to mention a reliably rational-"

"Not today, Sherlock," she said, cutting him off, a warning note in her tone that he had no intention of heeding.

"I refer back to our agreement-"

"For God's sake, Sherlock, I just attended your funeral!"

She quickly twisted around in the bed, and fixed him with a challenging stare. Now, with her face so close to his, he could see for the first time that she had been crying. Why had she been crying? He wasn't actually dead.

He had a feeling she might have mentioned the funeral at some point, but it hadn't seemed an important enough detail to retain. It was just another stage in the process of maintaining believable cover. That said, probably should have noticed that she had been dressed entirely in black when she came in.

"Why does that make a difference to where you sleep?" he demanded, ignoring the slightly petulant tone that seemed to have crept into his own voice.

Molly was a good foot away from him in the bed, but he could feel her (in his view, irrational) anger radiating from her slight form.

She took a deep breath, blinked, apparently searching his face for something and finding it wanting.

"I just spent an afternoon lying to a roomful of grief-stricken people, Sherlock," she said, more quietly and more composed than he was expecting. "Standing through a church service that held no real purpose, offering needless condolences to members of your family, lying, Sherlock, lying to my friends, to your friends. And then there was the wake, where I had to listen politely to stories about you, where I couldn't eat or drink anything because it made me feel sick when I looked at those people and thought about the deception of it all."

There was a silence, and during it Sherlock could see Molly's chest rise and fall at a more rapid pace.

"You're mistaken about one thing, Molly," he told her. "I don't have friends."

Molly sprung up in the bed then and, to avoid having her looming over him, Sherlock was forced to do the same.

"You don't have friends?" she repeated, her eyebrows raised in what seemed to be disbelief. "Do you want me to tell that to John Watson? To Mrs Hudson? To Greg Lestrade? You didn't have to see their faces, Sherlock. John was barely functioning; Mrs Hudson was in pieces. Donovan was there, too, and Anderson – all for you, Sherlock."

"Donovan and Anderson would happily dance on my grave," he snorted. "They both think I'm a fraud."

Molly's jaw tightened.

"Even if that were true," she replied. "Even if they really believe the lies, nobody there wanted you to be dead."

It hadn't escaped Sherlock's notice that Molly hadn't included herself in this charming guilt-trip exercise. But it seemed implausible that she would still think she didn't count.

"I'm sorry that you regret your decision to help me," he told her, almost spitting the words. It had seemed faintly ridiculous to be having this conversation in their pyjamas, in her bed.

"Don't…" Molly began, shaking her head. "You know that I would do anything, that I would help you in a heartbeat – and I don't regret for a second what we did. I even accept that I had to attend your funeral, that I will have to lie – and keep on lying – to people I care about, but I just thought that the least you could do would be to be…sensitive to that, to try to understand how that makes me feel. To not be a complete arsehole about it and to please, just please, accept that I need to sleep in my own bed tonight."

Sherlock was slightly taken aback by the force of her argument, and he later wondered whether this had been a turning point of some sort. He did feel cowed, he did feel beholden to her – but he couldn't yet allow Molly Hooper to know the effect she could have on him.

"I need to sleep here, too," he told her firmly.

She closed her eyes for a second, then shook her head again.

"Fine, Sherlock. Whatever. I…I honestly don't care," she said with a sigh.

And with that, she turned away from him again and wrapped herself in the duvet. She wasn't going anywhere. Sherlock stayed where he was for a long moment, his eyes on her, working through all of the 'issues' that had surfaced during the course of the conversation (it wouldn't serve any good purpose to refer to those issues as feelings).

Then he slowly lowered himself down onto the bed again, gently tugging the duvet up to his armpits and turning just slightly so that he was angled towards Molly. There was a sensible, acceptable distance between the two of them; she couldn't claim that he was invading her personal space, and there was no chance she could get the idea that this was anything more than a pragmatic compromise. Although her body-language and the tone of their recent discourse made that seem fairly unlikely anyway.

He tried to will his body to relax, which would in turn allow him to retreat into his Mind Palace. But his body refused to co-operate.

"Shut up!" he muttered without thinking.

He was slightly horrified to realise he'd said that aloud, and to hear Molly mutter a mumbled query in response.

Sherlock didn't reply, just continued to curse his traitorous body in silence. He was not about to explain to Molly Hooper that this was the first time he had shared a bed with a woman.

Or that perhaps it did count after all.