Bespoke Lingerie

It's always for a case.

Usually.

Sometimes.

Maybe not.

John, at this point, doesn't know. John, as of right now, doesn't care.

Because when the man that you love for his brains and his beauty tells you that today he's going for a lingerie fitting—no wait, let's rephrase that—when the man you love for his brains and his beautifully long legs and his unbelievably lush bum and his incredible neck tells you that he's about to purchase a bit of bespoke lingerie you may be forgiven for not giving one teeny tiny hot damn as to exactly why.

"What now?"

That was John's initial response. That, along with a full body flush, a sharply indrawn breath, and a split second visual of doing Sherlock up the arse while he lay back on bolts of silk.

John closed his laptop. Frankly his blog could get fucked for now. The good doctor cleared his throat. "Uh…what now?"

Sitting the other side of their desk, Sherlock closed his laptop. He knew this would happen. If he were a betting man he'd have put good money down on John reacting exactly this way. You don't have to be a consulting genius to know that John will eventually get used to the double-handful charms of Sherlock's arse, the ceaseless length of leg, or the way Sherlock sometimes parts his lips and those legs at the same time, but six months into their relationship the detective knew for sure that today was not that day.

"It's for a—"

John lifted a hand. "Don't say it. You don't have to say it ever again. Unless proven otherwise, when you brush your teeth I presume it's for a case. When I butter my toast I presume it's for a case. When you tug my trousers and pants down and do me on the stairs I…presume…"

John got briefly diverted by that recent memory, refocused two minutes later to find Sherlock had left the sitting room and was in the kitchen. The good doctor rose, followed, continued as if he'd not interrupted himself.

"…it's for a case. You could sell me off to a roving band of randy nomads and I will assume it's for a case. So you don't ever have to say that part. You just need to explain why."

John sat across from his sweetheart at the kitchen table, watched as the man began persecuting a bubbling yeast broth with denatured alcohol.

"There are nearly countless subsets to every sexual predilection, John." Sherlock's tone was perhaps a teeny bit lofty, as if he were about to teach his lover a thing or two.

Dr. John Watson remained attentive. There was nothing about his expression that said, About sexual kinks kindly tell me something I don't know. His open gaze didn't hint at the hours he'd spent in A&E removing strange items from rectums, vaginas, and urethras. His smiling mouth did not detail the abashed kink confessions he'd heard at surgery. No, John did not say anything at all because sometimes Sherlock needed to feel superior in order to feel even remotely equal.

"Cross-dressing, for example. There's a subset of people who are sexually aroused by men in heels. By men in makeup. Or by men in fancy lingerie."

John pointedly said nothing, as loudly as he possibly could. Eventually Sherlock noticed the roaring silence and looked away from his enfeebled yeast.

"Those people are called me, Sherlock."

Lately it always seemed as if Sherlock's got a pipette in his hand when John surprises him. Freud might have had something to say about that one.

Sherlock clutched the pipette a little tighter. "Oh really?"

John said more nothing, quietly. And this time what that quiet said was:

Go ahead, love.

Do it.

Deduce me.

A crooked smile flashed fast over Sherlock's face. Oh yes.

Sherlock's had exactly one lover in his life: This one. Most of his hands-on knowledge of sex comes from a single man: this man.

So when he and John became a couple, Sherlock had very little knowledge of…pretty much everything. Not that you need much in order to get it on, to which the billions of babies on this globe are testament. The point is, Sherlock went from the smartest man in the room to simply the most willing the night he and John became lovers, and six months later a balance still hasn't quite been reached.

Yet to his surprise Sherlock likes being a student. Providing John's the teacher. But Sherlock also likes being the master, doing the thing he knows so well how to do.

John won't ask Sherlock to deduce his thoughts very often. The good doctor's quite happy to say what he's thinking, thanks so much. But sometimes, just sometimes, this will be John's foreplay. Instead of opening arms or legs, he will open his mind. He'll let what he thinks and feels move his body for him, he'll let his thoughts flit clear as day over his face. He'll be an open book so that his lover can touch him in the way he feels most sure: with that big brain.

So John said nothing, just grinned at Sherlock, and it wasn't even three second in and already both heard the deepening in John's breathing.

"You love my height," Sherlock began. "You think it makes me look strong but at the same time my slenderness makes me appear taller than I am, which lends me a fragile air. That…let's call it an indomitable delicacy," a small smile again flashed fast over Sherlock's face, "…makes you fist your hands."

Under the kitchen table John carefully unclenched the hands resting on his thighs. His smile grew just a little.

"So heels, yes, you'd like to see me in tall heels of…" Sherlock contemplated briefly. "…at least four inches. They'd emphasize my height dramatically, and while the power-play between strong and fragile should confuse that libido of yours, you're—" another grin "—a complex man. So just the thought of me wearing—" Sherlock stared right at John's beautiful eyes. "—mmm, dark blue stilettos and nothing else has already started getting you hard."

John didn't say "brilliant," but he licked his lips, then let that tongue tip sort of stay in view awhile.

"You also think I'm beautiful, specifically my eyes and my mouth." John shifted minutely and Sherlock added quickly, "You love all of me, yes, I know, from my 'crazy cacophony of hair,' to my 'absurdly sentient' toes." Another flash of a smile there and gone—this kind of deducing was serious business. "But everyone's got predilections. You do. Even I do."

Another tiny movement from the man across the table and this time Sherlock grinned wide. John is a secure man, but even the confident want to know how others see them.

"I'm learning what mine are through you. I'm learning mine are you. You love my delicate height, I love your sturdy lack. When I hold you or am held by you there's…the sense that nothing could take you away from me, that you're exactly that sturdy, that solid, that there."

Sherlock tapped a finger to his chin. "I'd like to see you in heels I think. However, the very thought of that got you making fists again—and not in a good way—so let's move on."

"While you insist you love all of me, your predilections concerning my beauty are precise: You love my mouth and my eyes. So deep is your devotion that you wouldn't want them well-painted because then I wouldn't look like me. No…" Sherlock pursed the lips of that lavish mouth, looked into John's dark eyes again. "You'd want the coy tease. A dark smudge of kohl, a rosy stain on lips."

John didn't say "amazing," he just dropped his chin and lifted his gaze and sort of stayed that way.

Sherlock's mouth thought about going a bit dry, but his brain was busy and barreled ahead, kept him talking. "I think my favorite part of your body right now—it changes often, which surprised me at first—is your throat. Maybe because I know how sensitive the neck is, both yours and mine, and yet there it is on display every day for others to see. Always there for me to look at, to imagine where I've been on it and what I've done to it."

John saw that the pulse in Sherlock's throat had ticked up by nearly ten percent. A good doctor notices these things.

"You're not quite sure what you'd want to see me wear though you definitely know you want whatever it is to be dark because I so very much am not. That's why you don't want me in stockings, you want to enjoy the way the heels and the lingerie offset my paleness."

Here's where Sherlock stopped deducing and looked in his own mind's eye. What would look pretty on his pretty body?

"The lingerie should be something sheer," Sherlock bit his lip, almost tasted a rosy little lip stain, "and black and tight. Something that laces over chest and crotch but is a little too small. Small enough so that a generous swathe of skin shows through the laces."

The detective and the doctor actually sat there for a moment counting the fluttering beats in one another's neck.

"Which means I best get measured for something like that today because the fittings I planned are for other things entirely. I was going for expediency so thought beribboned knickers or mesh catsuits or dark hose and garters. I had no clue what to buy and so I—"

Sherlock correctly deduced the curling of John's toes, the clenching of his fists, and the now-screaming hard-on hidden under the table.

The lanky genius finally put the pipette down. The yeast was long since dead anyway. "Now?"

In reply John briefly cast his glance south. "If your experiment can tolerate," John stopped, cleared his throat so he sounded less like a man about to make an obscene phone call, "your absence for five minutes or fifty, I'd—"

Sherlock stood. Went so far as to rise on tip-toe, standing still and tall on imagined heels. "Will you come, when I go for the fitting?"

John stood, shrugged his shoulders so that the collar of his button down shirt tugged away from his neck a little. "I'm going to come right now. And so are you. And yes, later too. There if possible. In the back room or the loo or the cab we're definitely getting."

Sherlock didn't feel badly about digging the heels of his shoes into the kitchen table a few minutes later, mostly because he was too busy trying to get his trousers down around his ankles. He didn't feel badly about it later either because every time he sees those three inch scrapes he remembers John stripping with great speed and mounting the table just before mounting him.

John will feel badly about the scuff marks and the table's new wobble, but being as every time he notices either in the future he also hears Sherlock moaning, he feels Sherlock's hips rising, and he also sees again hot white spurts of come as they spatter over Sherlock's hairless belly, John's regret will take the odd form of labored breathing and a biting of the lips.

And frankly neither of them will feel badly in a few hours, when they're at the tailor and they use the plush, well-appointed gentleman's loo for a furious rut.

While they are thus engaged, the owner of the shop will sip his tea and eat several cream biscuits in the warm, hushed fitting room. His great grand-papa started the store, and it was way back then that the family discovered this unique way of boosting revenue.

Silvere & Son, Inc. have fitted three sitting prime ministers for pretty camisoles. They've taken the measurements of well-known lords and legal minds, they've hand-crafted lace panties and bustiers, fingerless silk gloves and arse-less bodysuits for award-winning actors and artists, household names and very old names. When, nearly one hundred years ago, they couldn't at first locate fishnet stockings that would fit a man's generally beefier, longer leg ,they became specialists in crafting that particular item themselves, from the sourcing and spinning of the cotton, to determining the sexiest diameter for the netting's holes.

So, with such a heritage behind him, and his own thirty years of fitting fine gentlemen for fine silks and satins, Sir Cameron Silvere—it will always be simple discretion that prevents him from telling you exactly which royals he has fitted, or which appreciative set sought and gained for him his knighthood—understood exactly what was happening in the gentleman's lounge right now.

Silvere was glad he'd got the sound proofing put in both the men and women's rooms all those years ago. Of course he'd been much younger then, but the unrelieved erections he'd had to cope with after his customers had "stepped away for a moment"—well they'd been his least favorite part of this really rather marvelous business.

Cameron Silvere nibbled a biscuit contentedly and thought perhaps, when the men emerged, he might suggest to the pretty one that he try the blue lace-up briefs or perhaps the velvet gauntlets with the silver embroidery and—

Ah, here he came now, with his tall sweetheart.

Time to continue the fittings.

This series, "A Little Birdie Told Me..." is inspired by tweets from Sherlock cast and crew. However, a brilliant writer calling themselves Cumberholmes tweets as well, and said in reference to Sherlock two words that I could not let go: Bespoke lingerie. The result was this story. Cumberholmes, the stilettos are in the mail. I hope I got your size right.