He is warm and damp in my arms. I can feel our wet clothes flush against our flesh, feel it cling to us both, plastering us together. My arms are stiff around him but he doesn't seem to mind. The moment I tried to hold him he began to hold me tighter as if I might change my mind and leave him.
I have not been held in years, since I was a child, memories as distant and forgotten as the life I have left behind. To feel them hold me as if I matter to them.
I can feel his breath on my neck. I can feel his heat saturate me, his heart is pounding against my chest.
My stiff unnatural arms slide closer around him and I wonder if this is what people strive for in their petty mindless lives, is this feeling which every soul spends their life chasing after? Like fighting until you forget who you were and a surrender that feels like home?
He makes no movement to pull away from me and I find myself wishing I could linger. Beneath my finger tips he shivers and as usual when it comes to Watson I feel things I never have, that I never should.
Sorrow and guilt twist my gut like a pang when I think of the pained looks he has given me for years, the way his hands twitched with need for more, with want for this.
How long has he gone without human touch because I keep him jealously as my own. How long has he wanted this from me? Needed this in his quiet suffering?
My Watson is trying to show me that it is alright to share my secrets with him. For weeks I have watched him toil over it, how to reassure me that I can trust him, how to say without words that he would never think less of me.
But he doesn't know. I have always trusted him, in the irrational way of the wayward softer emotions, in the pull of intuition and the factors of a million tiny details imprinting his character on my brain. But from the first time he walked into my life with eyes, filled not with horror but bemusement, his opinion has meant to me more than that of the world.
He has no idea the secrets I hide.
I bow my head so that my whisper is something secret and small in his ear, a confession and a beginning.
"Watson once again you have taken all the proper facts and made all the wrong conclusions."
He pulled himself away from me, his hands lingering on my hips, immediately I felt his loss, the cold rushed against my skin, invading the places he once existed.
"Then tell me what I have missed."