Over the course of her years at the Pie Hole, Olive Snook had dreamed up an almost endless string of imaginary futures for herself and the people around her. She had imagined marrying Ned in at least a dozen different wedding ceremonies, ranging from white-dress church weddings to white-jumpsuit edge-of-outer-space weddings to white-jodhpur horseback weddings. She had imagined having children with him, 20 of them, in varying sets of two to five children per imaginary life. She had imagined the rocking chairs they would buy when they were old together and the car they would buy if they ever won the lottery together.
She had also dreamed up a few futures for Chuck, after the other woman's unexpected arrival. In her more charitable moments, she had imagined a globe-covering, completely death-free cruise for Chuck, with a cozy little house at the end of it, perhaps in some conveniently distant and exotic place like coastal France where Olive and Ned would both enjoy visiting her and be able to completely avoid mention of her between visits. In her less charitable moments, she had imagined a string of dramatic deaths for the other woman, ranging from falling down the stairs to being sucked up by a tornado and dumped, not into the magical land of Oz, but into the enclosure of a hungry tiger.
She had even imagined futures for Emerson Cod, rosy futures, in spite of his perpetual grumpiness, where he knitted sweaters for his daughter and could actually give them to her once they were finished.
What she had never imagined, even once, was a future that included a lanky dark-haired Englishman charging in through the front door and announcing that he knewprecisely what Ned was hiding and that he needed to know if he could count on Ned's help.
Olive assumed that by "what Ned was hiding," the stranger meant Chuck's faked death. It should have bothered her that he knew about it, after she'd kept the secret - kept so many secrets - for this long, but she found that there wasn't much of anything that could really bother her if it was being said in the stranger's deep, perfect, accented voice. The stranger disappeared into the kitchen to talk to Ned, and Olive hoped, briefly, that the Pie Maker would be able to help him, before going back to what she'd been doing before, which was daydreaming.
This time, her imaginary future included the dark-haired stranger sitting across from her at one of the diner's tables, holding out a deep red rose. When she took it, she noticed that its petals felt as soft and velvety as the stranger's voice had sounded. It was a nice future.
After the dark-haired man left, walking out the front door without so much as a glance toward Olive, Ned seemed oddly quiet. Chuck eventually talked him into revealing that the man was an "old school friend," and that his name was Sherlock Holmes. No one could get him to say any more than that, and since Olive was the only one particularly interested, conversation on the subject was allowed to die. Olive hoped that if the man really were a friend, he would come visit Ned - and, by extension, visit her - often.
Olive's next encounter with Sherlock came over the phone. He asked to speak to Ned. She tried to make small talk, to keep him on the line with her as long as possible, but it didn't work very well. He informed her that he knew quite well what she was doing and didn't have the time for it. She handed the phone over to Ned, feeling disappointed, and went back to her daydreaming. Now, there was the rose future and the talking-on-the-phone-for-hours-saying-sweet-nothin gs future. Both were nice imaginary futures, if a bit distant.
Ned did not take Olive with him to England when he left, unexpectedly, the next day. The only thing that made her feel better was that he didn't take Chuck, either. He didn't even take Emerson. He went by himself, and when he got back, he said even less than he'd said when the man came into the pie shop a few weeks earlier.
Several months later, Olive had begun to despair of ever seeing Sherlock again. She'd even stopped daydreaming about him. No more rose futures. No more phone futures. She'd gone back to planning out her children with Ned. Their 21st imaginary future child was a girl named Nellie who looked almost exactly like her father, but had longer hair. She was an only child. She was too perfect to put in a combination with any of their other imaginary future children, at least until a sufficiently perfect sibling could be imagined to match her.
Olive almost didn't see Sherlock when he strode into the Pie Hole again, the collar of his long coat pulled up dramatically around his face. She was serving coffee to a customer and thinking about Nellie's perfect, tiny face. But then he spoke, and his voice almost stopped her heart in her chest. It was just the way she remembered it. "Rhubarb custard today, is it? Hmm."
Olive spun on her heel, hurrying over to meet Sherlock. "Oh! Hello, there! It's Sherlock, right?" she realized, suddenly, that for all her imagined futures, she hadnot imagined what she would say if Sherlock walked into the Pie Hole and started actually talking about pie. She had to deflect. Collect herself. If she wanted her imaginary Sherlock futures to become real Sherlock futures, she couldn't afford to mess this up. She fell back on routine. "Let me go get that pie for you, hon."
She hurried into the kitchen, where she realized she actually had no idea what Sherlock wanted. A slice? A cup-pie? An entire pie? This was terrible! She spun on her heel, turning so that she could go back and ask - better to look like a flake than to bring him the wrong thing and make him feel like he had to eat something he didn't want.
The end of the spin put her nose-to-sternum with Sherlock, who had followed her into the back, catching the doors and going through them before they could close. She squeaked in surprise.
Sherlock cleared his throat awkwardly, "That's quite alright," his eyes drifted downward to read her nametag and then snapped right back up to her face, "Olive. I'm here to see Ned, not to eat pie." He took one long step backward and Olive realized, as he got farther away, that he smelled like hotel soap. She didn't think anything of it, other than that it was a pretty nice smell.
Ned came out of the storeroom and almost dropped the basket of fruit he was carrying. "You can't be here," he declared, sounding surprised.
"Interesting," Sherlock said, stepping around Olive and toward Ned, "As I seem toalready be here."
Ned put the basket down on a counter with a thump, "I don't care. You can't stay." He glanced over at Olive, and she got the feeling that she wasn't wanted. She wasn't sure she cared whether she was wanted or not. Ned and Sherlock were in the same room at the same time. She had no interest in leaving.
Ned met her eyes for a second and then kept talking to Sherlock, as if deciding not to fight her on it. "It's not safe. You know that."
Sherlock looked at Olive. She felt equally unwanted under Sherlock's faint glare. She pushed her chin up, not moving. She worked here. She could stand wherever she liked.
His eyes narrowed slightly farther, and then widened again. "Olive, as neither a waitress nor a jockey has any place in our present conversation, it might be best if you returned to serving coffee. The man at the table beside the door will have run out by now."
Olive had no idea how Sherlock knew about the man at the front needing coffee, but she did know that if he'd found out she was a former jockey, it meant he'd looked her up. That glance down at her nametag had clearly been some kind of attempt to look like he hadn't been thinking about her all this time. How adorable! She could play along with that, if he liked. Anything to keep from spooking a man who actuallyliked her back.
Olive presented Sherlock with her brightest, toothiest smile. "Of course, sweetie. Can't have folks running out of coffee!" She forced the look of triumph to stay off of her face until she'd turned around and he couldn't see it.
Scurrying out into the dining room, Olive went about her usual business of pouring coffee, chatting with customers, and daydreaming. She wondered what Ned and Sherlock were talking about. She wondered if they were talking about her.
Ned came out of the kitchen first, rubbing the back of his head and looking vaguely sheepish. Olive knew a story when she saw one. She hurried over to talk to him. "What's going on, Ned? Is Sherlock still here?"
The Pie Maker sighed, "Sherlock is staying here. He's going to be our daytime baker. I'll do most of the pies in the mornings, he'll do the cup-pies and whatever we need refreshed in the middle of the day."
Olive wasn't used to things changing. Things didn't change here very often. Before Chuck, nothing had ever changed. And now that she'd adjusted to the changes Chuck had brought, she wasn't all that interested in more change, or at least, she wouldn't be if Sherlock weren't such a welcome one, as changes went. Even so, she couldn't help but comment, "But Chuck always makes the cup-pies. They were her idea!"
Ned sighed, still rubbing the back of his neck, "I know. But right now, she's on the road keeping a reasonable distance between her and her aunts while she watches their show from the back of every audience on the tour. And I could use the extra help until she gets back."
That was true. It was something they could explain to Chuck when she returned, cutting down on further changes to Olive's status quo, and it was going to make a whole lot of her imaginary futures much more achievable. "Works for me!" she exclaimed, hoping Ned would think she was just being her usual cheery, easy-going self, and would not figure out that she now felt just as strongly about Sherlock as she had about Ned when she'd started working here.
Three minutes later, the man in the front booth ordered an extra slice of pie, to go. Olive smiled brightly, rushing back to the kitchen for a box. She pushed open the door to see Sherlock standing in the middle of the room, his back toward her as he rolled out piecrust. He'd abandoned the jacket, which was laid neatly across an empty stool in the corner of the room, in favor of an apron with white strings. The shirt underneath it was made of a fine blue fabric, which shimmered faintly in the light as he worked.
This was as good a time as any to meet her new coworker. "Hello, again!" she exclaimed cheerfully, "Ned says you're working here, now."
Sherlock turned around. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing a set of pale, perfectly shaped forearms, dusted lightly with flower in uneven patches extending all the way up to the cuffs of his shirt. The front of the apron, which she recognized as one she'd once bought Ned for Christmas, read, "Mr. Good Lookin' is Cookin'." Ned had never worn it, and she almost thought her feelings should be hurt if he'd given it away so easily. But then she decided that it was accurate enough that she might as well decide that she'd bought it for Sherlock, and simply hadn't realized it at the time.
"Indeed," Sherlock said, sounding faintly disgusted.
Olive ignored Sherlock's unenthusiastic tone of voice. She ignored the way he turned away from her again, immediately after giving his one word answer, without saying anything more. What she didn't ignore were his perfect curls, his perfect posterior, or the thousand imaginary futures that had just exploded into her head.
She grabbed a box from the cabinet, but her mind was a million miles away from the man in the front booth's pie. She had a thousand imaginary futures. Now, all that remained was to chase them until they became reality.
Thanks for reading! I don't anticipate writing further chapters of this, but I hope you enjoyed it and I hope the ending gave you enough closure. I wrote it based on a comment cosmic-nerd-angel made on one of her tumblr drawings.