When Sherlock met Molly Hooper, he'd stayed in the lab until three am. She'd gotten him one cup of coffee, and then another. The first, weak, cold hospital coffee was horrible, but just as he'd requested it, black, two sugars. The second time, she'd brought three sugars for him to mix in.
"No Molly, this isn't my coffee. My coffee has two sugars already in it."
That had come out louder than he thought it would, or maybe the room was very quiet.
She just stared, Her eyes were brown; he felt like he should have noticed that before. "Sorry."
"No, that's just me, I like what I like."
He smiled;. His smile, he'd heard, was 'enigmatic". Maybe that would suggest he could sound deadly serious when trying to be witty.
Her coffee was on the table. It looked light, like cafe au lait. He guessed she might like those drinks that were fluffy with milk foam, lattes.
There was a cafe he liked run by a well-known criminal where they made the best espresso. They knew him there, he could order two at a time there, he could get a full-sized cup of espresso and pour in plenty of sugar. Molly would like their lattes strong coffee smoothed out with fluffy milk.
For just a moment, he tried to imagine Molly drinking a cafe latte and getting foam around her mouth. Not too sexy, her mouth was small, thinnish lips. Ah, well.
Sherlock's brother, Mycroft, had once told him that he shouldn't go on and on about things like science when talking to women. Mycroft didn't know about tutoring Joanne in Biology, which proved that his gem of brotherly wisdom didn't hold true. Later, Mycroft had told him that staying too quiet wasn't good either. Well, Sherlock's dear brother was very close to a second divorce, and his misstress had cut him off last month. So, what did he know?
Sherlock knew that, at university, the beautiful Jane had found his silences "intriguing".
In that those last hours at the morgue, he tried a little silence. Talking had started tripping him up, and he had experiments to run. Molly tolerated his silence. Around 2 am, Dr. Barlow came early for his shift He wished them good morning, nothing more.
Wordlessly, Sherlock cursed the doctor. Even while he worked, he had felt a thrill being alone there with a woman. Laboratories always brought it back; the churned-up sexy excitement he'd felt when he was fifteen. These places were so cold and dull that it felt all the more illicit. He wanted to sit Molly up on one of those counters and kiss her. He wanted to have his hands on her. moving aside that white coat.
And then suddenly, Dr. Barlow arrived, bustling around the place doing his work. The lab was all buisnes now.
"I've got to go," Molly said at 3 am. She stood up and stretched same as she would rising
from a long sleep. "I want to get home and rest before I have to come back at 10am. I want to get out of this damn lab-coat for a while."
Molly out of that damn lab-coat, Sherlock got lost in that for a moment. Her lab-coat would carry the faint whiff of the lab, but it would mostly smell like her. She'd shed it at the door when she got home and leave it crumpled on the floor. Maybe she'd wash off the day with a hot shower and come out all warm and relaxed. Maybe. . .
Sherlock forced his mind back to his work. He had to finish and get the results to Scotland Yard before M.E. Anderson even figured out where to start his investigation.
Sherlock Holmes got home to his empty flat before 4 am. He hated keeping regular hours. Sleeping when everyone eles slept, eating breakfast in the morning, etc., long periods of this kind of time meant he wasn't working. What was he supposed to do with all that empty time?
As he'd told Molly, he was an appalling flatmate. He kept chemicals and body-parts in the fridge, sometimes unlabeled in the sort of plastic containers most people used for leftover pasta. He stank up the place with his experiments. He would lie, motionless, on the couch for hours at a time, no matter what was happening around him. It all made him an intolerable flatmate, he'd been told as much, even by Matthew who'd said it with a smile and stayed for almost a year. "My intolerable flatmate," that's the way he'd introduce him to his friends from the School of Economics who'd stop by with pizza and beer.
The only really objectionable thing about old Matt started when he fell in love with Isabelle, a tiny preschool teacher. Isabelle liked to have loud, bed-shaking sex at all hours of the night and refused to take it to her own place for fear of disturbing the her quiet "prudish" flatmate. Sherlock would hear them from his room, or even the hallway. The one time he'd thrown a shoe at the wall and yelled 'STOP IT!' wasn't addressed when he saw them in the morning.
When Sherlock came home that night, Matt was sitting at the kitchen table. It was very late for Matt, he must have had something to say.
"Sherlock, I think we need some kind of system. After last night, I think we need to figure out something."
What they figured out was that he didn't like having to hear howler-monkey-loud sex in his apartment and that Matt wanted to be able to have whatever kind of sex he wanted in his apartment. And that they both wanted the apartment and didn't want to find another flat-mate. What they decided was that Matt and Isabelle wouldn't have sex while Sherlock was around, or that they'd at least let him know it was time to put on the headphones.
Staying out of the flat was easy. Even when he wasn't working, he loved the city at night. Sound, sight smell. yes smell, it all kept his mind working. He observed strangers on the streets and in the subway, learning things they didn't expect anybody would know.
After growing up in "the country" or at school, after vacationing on beaches and mountains, he'd spent years at the university. That practically had a wall around it. He felt safest in the city because it was so active.
When Sherlock did get home from the moruge to the empty apartment, he flopped on the couch while he had the chance. Lastrad would be at his door as soon as he'd gotten the phone messages Sherlock had called in from the St. Bart's.
He thought about Molly sleeping alone in her tiny flat, what she slept in and what she did first thing in the morning. He thought about what her body really looked like and how he'd see her, still a mystery in a few hours. He thought about how he'd actually talked to her and how she didn't seem to think he was crazy. They would be back in the lab together again today.