Cara sat at her desk in the dimly lit bedroom, typing in a phone conversation. Her part was easy, but the words for him just didn't seem right tonight. She and Ryan had been seeing each other for a while, and she was starting to tell her so called school friends that they were going steady.
Tonight was heavy going, though: she had a week's worth of texts and emails to set up, and the love just wasn't there.
After an hour of making up cute messages he could send her, Cara had had enough. She decided that maybe she was cooling towards Ryan. That would provide a little drama, actually.
Sometimes she thought she enjoyed the breakups more than the getting together.
She rubbed her eyes.
When she looked back at the screen, there was a new message from Ryan.
Not possible.
She clicked the options. Had she just blanked out on typing it? Things had been pretty crazy lately in more ways than one.
She watched as another message popped up on the screen under Ryan's name.
This was beyond weird. And on top of school and everything, not what she needed right now.
She was packing the notebook away from the gaze of her PPs - paranoid parents - when a knock on the window made her jump.
She was five storeys up with no balcony. Their apartment was in a block on its own gated lot. No-one was outside her window. It had been a bird, or something.
She crossed the room and opened her curtains.
Her parents, downstairs in the living room, only heard her scream.
xxxxx
He was such a child. Joan knew how old he was, from his case file - but found it hard to reconcile the number of years he'd been alive with the behaviour she saw demonstrated on a daily basis.
His enthusiasm and joy in small discoveries, his vulnerability, his spongelike absorption of trivial detail - these were the endearing side of his childlike behaviour. The petty refusal to take responsibility for household chores, the self centred world view, and the startling arrogance -these were less appealing.
Joan had developed a facial expression which she found herself using more and more when Sherlock displayed his inner child. She thought of it as her 'I can't believe you're forty' face.
Sherlock did not care. He gave her his 'you are impinging on my mind palace' face and carried on.
Today he was blissfully involved with an internet study into the effects of social networking sites on traditional conversation skills. He was hunched over the keyboard, headphones on, occasionally barking a word or two at the screen. After intervals of terse speech there followed periods of furious typing.
"Who are you talking to?" Joan whispered as she put a cup of tea down on the table beside him.
"A lecture hall in Palo Alto. I'm their keynote webcaster."
"Right. I'll be upstairs with my copy of Classic Autopsies Monthly."
They both turned as the phone began to ring.
"Don't mock, Watson! Mockery demeans the mocker as much as the mockee. No, not you, professor. My colleague at this end, although that does form a nearly perfect example of -"
Joan rolled her eyes and went to answer the phone.
"Hey Joanie."
"Hi Toby, how are you?"
"Not great as a matter of fact. Can you and Sherlock get over here?" He gave the address.
"We'll be right there," she promised. Gregson made a noise like a wince of pain. "Are you ok?"
"I'm doing fine." He rang off.
Three minutes later, Sherlock and Joan were in the street and heading for the crime scene.