Chapter Eight: Wrecked
Rated M for men going at it. Also, references to drugs and guys playing a bit rough. Although I doubt John is actually playing.
It is a little-known fact that some people look good naked, dripping wet, and with an arm pinned behind their back.
Sherlock Holmes was not one of those people.
Forced up against the side of the pool, his chest pressed to the wall, he looked, and well, felt, absolutely devastating. Possibly even better than usual, what with the heaving and the gasping and the application of an evasive maneuver indistinguishable from shimmying.
These distractions were not a strategic advantage for John. Unfortunately for Sherlock, the army doctor's strategic advantages were already numerous.
"You … said … you wanted …" Sherlock spat out, glaring over his bare shoulder at his short, bristling roommate, whose left arm was slung casually against his throat.
"That? Not that specifically, no," said the bristly one. "Let's go over some ground rules, shall we?"
Sherlock tended to respond to John's requests with either "Boring" or "Let's." He croaked out the latter. John correctly diagnosed this as not a display of enthusiasm, but rather the upshot of having exactly one syllable's worth of breath at his disposal. He let go, and his stubborn captive slumped forward, forehead knocking against the deck with a muffled thump.
"First of all," said John, "when I invite you to toss me off, I'm expecting something a little more low-key. It would help if you cut back on that walk you do. That stalking thing."
"Why?" demanded Sherlock, his voice somewhat stifled by his face-down posture. "Not attractive?"
"Never mind if it's attractive!" It was, in fact, ridiculously hot, but very predatory and not well suited to a first date. Not when the other participant's life menu had included seven courses of taxpayer-funded combat training and a dollop of post-traumatic stress disorder for pudding.
John tried not to dwell on how his life had come to such a pass that a quick grope in an alien cleansing pool now constituted a date. Was it a date? Really, it was just his first attempt at doing something consensual with Sherlock, rather than coerced. Unless you counted the fact that they were probably both on mind-altering Keplerian sex drugs, in which case, who knew.
"When you bear down on me like that," John pointed out, "it gets my adrenaline going, and my fight response kicks in." Captain Watson had long ago given up on pretending that there was any flight component to his fight-or-flight repertoire.
"And? What's wrong with that?"
"I might hurt you." This was an attempt to spare a civilian's feelings. The operative word was "will."
"Again, what's … ow!"
"I'm just saying," said John, evenly, "that I want to go slowly at first. This brings me to my next point. When I ask you to stop stalking me – "
Here, John gave an involuntary shiver of arousal at the sense memory of Sherlock advancing on him, jaw set, gaze determined. It's one thing to agree to a quick hand job, but another to look into another man's eyes as he looms over you and register that he's six inches taller, three times crazier, and hellbent on wrecking you with sensual pleasure. This is especially overwhelming when you know that he has almost no practical knowledge of how to accomplish this. The recollection made John's stomach do flip-flops for at least two different reasons. Only one of them was fear.
"Are you going to finish that sentence?"
"When I ask you to stop stalking me," John continued, "I don't mean for you to dive under the water, swim up to me, pick me up, twirl me around, and try to grab me by the dick. Build up, Sherlock. We went over it. Do you remember anything about build up? Teasing?"
"I remember teasing perfectly well. 'Sherlock, stroke your testicles. Sherlock, get your legs further apart.'"
"Good. Yes, that."
"What I mostly remember is it didn't work."
Oh. Shit. John reminded himself never to fuck an empiricist. "You what?"
"It didn't work," insisted Sherlock. He preferred not to repeat himself, but would sometimes make that concession if he felt John were being especially thick. "What worked was that you put your hand on me."
Of course. That's what John had done, and it had resulted in a shuddering climax for the person he was tutoring. Naturally, Sherlock thought this kind of abruptness worked on everybody.
John got lost for a moment in how it had been to touch Sherlock – how warm and slick and solid he felt against John's palm. The curve of him. The way his eyelids crinkled when he came. The way he bellowed his pleasure, as he bellowed everything else.
But most of all, John thought about the way Sherlock had cried out his name. In his mouth, it sounded like "Eureka." It sounded like he was announcing a scientific breakthrough. In fact, it was entirely possible that the discovery that other people had first names was a scientific breakthrough, as far as Sherlock was concerned. Did he even know anyone else's given name? John wouldn't be surprised if he'd deleted them all. A pity, because that voice …
Er.
John backed up. It wouldn't do for Sherlock to feel John's erection poking him smack in the arse in the middle of a talk on appropriate behavior.
"Ah. So you were …"
"Trying to return the favor, yes," said Sherlock, raising his head off the deck. He looked like a man well aware of almost having been skewered, mid-conversation, by an inexorable hard-on. "And I nearly got my shoulder dislocated for my trouble."
"I'm sorry I hurt you. I suppose you did offer to do to me what …" John let the thought trail off. "Just give a bloke some warning, will you? If we're going to do this, we need to start taking cues from each other. Check in with me, and if I want to try ... something on you, I'll do the same."
"Try what?" Sherlock wheeled around on his heels to fix John with an interrogative stare. It was a pity the aliens hadn't transported any outerwear for him. A greatcoat would have flapped dashingly about his submerged ankles just now. "What do you want to try?"
Oh God. A list of things John didn't want to try would have been shorter. Visions of sexual acts to be performed on top of, with, and at the mercy of one's brilliant, deranged roommate danced in his head like so many lithe, long-limbed sugarplums. He imagined licking his way down Sherlock's body, scratching him lightly with his nails. He pictured treating himself to Sherlock's mouth, his throat, his belly. His moans, his desire, his cock. The whole, long lushness of him. He thought of bending Sherlock, hard and wet and wanting, over the jubilantly springy blackcurrant bed. He thought about …
Sherlock regarded his roommate first with intensity, then with consternation, and finally with wry fascination. John felt as though the warp and weft of his own neurons were laid out in a carpet of perversion for the man to see.
"John. Allow me to congratulate you. Your brain, while not, for the most part, remarkable, has the advantage of being utterly filthy." Sherlock said the last word with the purring relish usually reserved for "toxic," "radioactive," or "literally on fire."
John coughed. "Yeah. Well. Getting back to …" He couldn't say "the subject at hand" without it sounding like a line from "Are You Being Served." Not that Sherlock would get the reference.
"The topic," he concluded. "We should have a safeword."
The look on Sherlock's face said, "I'll thank you not to speak gibberish." For a look with "thank you" in it, it was not a particularly thankful look.
"Right." John always tried to keep a partner's idiosyncrasies in mind ("Partner"? Is that what he is to me? Yes. No. Maybe), but Sherlock presented special challenges. A man who wasn't aware that sodomy could not cause pregnancy was unlikely to have mastered the intricacies of sexual etiquette. Not that he'd mastered the etiquette of anything else. "It's a word that means 'stop.'"
Sherlock looked incredulous. "Such as, for example, 'stop'?"
"Er, yeah, but …" This speech had sounded so much more sensible when John had been on the receiving end of it on that memorable New Year's Eve in the loo at the Barrel and Biscuit. The women's loo, he mentally emphasized, in case Sherlock was listening in.
"John, it can hardly have escaped even your notice that there's already a word for stop. And that word is …"
"OK, but I say 'stop' and you interpret that as the go-ahead for something even more over the top. If I'm asking you not to slink towards me, it's probably not time to grab a handful."
Sherlock considered this. There was a long pause.
"All right."
John blinked. "All right?"
"Yes. All right. Noted. I can learn, John. I'm not an imbecile. Show me what you want."
Good Lord. John felt as though he'd been handed a blank check. He took a deep breath. He put his hands on Sherlock's waist, then positioned the two of them an arm's length apart. The fact that the unit of measurement was based on John's arm, rather than Sherlock's, made them closer than they would otherwise be.
"Maybe you can start by, I don't know, touching me a bit."
John was about to provide information on where Sherlock could touch him – waist, arm, right shoulder – when Sherlock made a sudden movement. Before John could issue a word of caution, the man reached out and touched …
His face. His plain, he thought, and rather weathered face.
Perhaps wondering where the sweeping zygomatic arches were, Sherlock ran an inquisitive index finger over John's cheek. He gave similar attention to John's crow's feet. Next on the list was John's forehead. The long fingers were firm, careful, questioning.
John closed his eyes and let Sherlock memorize where his wrinkles were. In the past, John's partners had avoided them. No one wanted to call attention to the effects of time on a lover's body, no matter how fit and admirably preserved. Virtually no one, anyway.
Sherlock, however, was in his glory. He traced each fine line exactly once, enumerating them as an entomologist might the veins on a Venezuelan glasswing. His touch held precision and curiosity. These were as close as he got to reverence.
At the end of this ritual, John had no doubt that Sherlock would now be able to identify him from a chalk outline of his wrinkles alone, just as he might identify a fingerprint by its whorls or a corpse from its dental records. It occurred to John that being the subject of someone's pre-mortem investigation should have been disturbing. Somehow, with Sherlock, the gesture was sweetly intimate.
"May I back you up against the edge of the pool?"
John had been submerged in a state of tactilely produced hypnosis, but this snapped him out of it. "Why?"
"Because you were concerned about being seen. I feel … protective of you. Is that all right?"
John breathed out. "It's fine." He let Sherlock guide him backwards until his back encountered the solidity of the wall.
Ah. This was good. Whatever else was going on in the pool, Sherlock was eclipsing it. He was well suited to the task. Even by masculine standards, there was a lot of Sherlock to contend with, most of it laid out along the vertical axis.
And yet, for a man with so much there there, there was still something vulnerable about him. John felt a bit guilty. It was clear who had the power in their burgeoning relationship, and it wasn't Sherlock.
"I want this," said Sherlock, having read the fine print on John's forehead. "You don't have to be afraid I don't."
"You haven't done this before."
"The thought has occurred."
"We could be jacked up on who knows what."
"I've spent most of my adult life 'jacked up on who knows what.' I'm sober, John. Trust an addict to know. I haven't been this sober since I was sixteen. I know you cherish the notion that we're both delirious on libido enhancers, but I think it's safe to say that, much like your limp – where has that gone, by the way? – your insistence that you're wildly inebriated is part of your own psychological defense sys—"
"Right," said John. There was no need for him to be laid any more bare than he already was. "So how do you …"
"Honestly, John. I don't have to know how to bring you to climax in order to know that I want it. Now." Sherlock held out his wrist. "A practical demonstration. Show me."
John took the offered hand, squeezed it a moment, then pressed it against his solar plexus.
"Slowly," he said.
"I know."
John guided the flat of Sherlock's palm down his chest to his stomach.
"If you decide that it's …"
Sherlock let out a puff of frustrated air. "John, stop thinking. Just stop."
John giggled. The giggles became a guffaw.
"Oh God," he said, wiping his eyes on the back of his free hand. "First time I've heard you say that."
Sherlock grinned. It was a rare, honest, lopsided grin, and John felt blessed to have experienced it firsthand.
John guided Sherlock's palm down below the surface of the water and through the cloud of golden mica that had been protecting his modesty. Bidding said modesty farewell, he placed Sherlock's hand squarely on his balls.
"Ungh," said Sherlock, as if all his pleasure centers were located directly in his fingertips. If John thought he was going to get in the first moan, he was mistaken.
"So. Probably the best way to show you is by …" John extended a hand towards Sherlock's middle, then looked at him to check if it was all right.
"If you want," said Sherlock. There was that vaguely panicked look again.
"What?"
He swallowed, and John was treated to the sight of his Adam's apple dipping and rising in his long, refined throat.
"If you touch me, I'll have an orgasm. Another orgasm. In addition to the one I just had." Nervousness erased Sherlock's ban on redundance.
"I'm already touching you," said John, looking down at the mica cloud concealing Sherlock's hand, which was still somewhere extraordinarily intimate.
"That's me touching you. It's different."
Just John's luck: Sherlock had no apparent knowledge of refractory periods.
"Sherlock, I don't think you're going to come immediately. You just got off, and you're in your thirties. You'll probably need a bit of a calm-down period before anything major happens again."
"All right." Sherlock placed John's free hand on himself. It didn't take but five seconds for his eyes to start rolling back in his head. "John. Oh, God. John."
Before the man could reach an apparently undesired climax, John removed his hand. "Um. I see what you mean."
John knew that this type of response – to wit, Sherlock being ready to go off like a SIG Sauer whenever John laid a hand on him – was widely considered to be a turn-off. He couldn't for the life of him think why. Who gave a damn about endurance? Sherlock would perhaps eventually work himself up to greater stamina, and if not, who cared. Not John. Not when the man in front of him was a beautiful, quivering, undefended mess.
"Right," said John. "Let's just work on me for a moment."
"Let's."
Ah. Here was the enthusiasm that had been absent from Sherlock's earlier, coerced acquiescence.
John molded Sherlock's fingers into a ring around the base of John's erection, then slowly moved it upwards. The ascension felt like six kinds of heaven, each slightly more perverse than the last.
"It feels good," said John. "You're not hurting me. You can relax."
"I'm trying to – oh. Oh." Sherlock had reached the glans in its velvet straightjacket.
"Unh. Um. That's … good." John knew there were other adjectives, but fuck if he could remember them. "Yeah. Drag your thumb …"
Sherlock already had ideas for where to drag his thumb. Like many of his ideas, these were fantastic.
"The skin," observed Sherlock, stroking it for emphasis. "It's not retracting."
John could feel himself blush. "Sometimes it gets a bit stuck."
Sherlock gave a short nod, as though this confirmed something he'd suspected. "I can see why. The delta between the girth of the head and the width of the shaft …"
Oh, God, thought John. He's not put off by it. He likes it. The daft bastard likes it. This was starting to look like the defining principle of their association. Things that should have put one or both of them off seemed magnificent in context.
"May I?" asked Sherlock with uncharacteristic delicacy.
"Uh, yeah. It's good you asked. Why not. Just …"
Sherlock gently eased the skin over the fat, sensitive glans, then eased it back down again, rubbing up against some of John's favorite millimeters of flesh in the process. John gave a little moan of ecstasy. Sherlock frowned in concentration. This was not an especially erotic look unless you had a theory as to what it meant, and John did. Having confirmed that his mate had an oversized knob, Sherlock was calculating what it would feel like to be gloriously, laboriously belabored by it.
The genius wanted feedback on his nascent hand job technique. "Do you like it?"
"Pervert. You know I do. You just want to hear me say it." John's balls had been aching for days with the strain of not emptying themselves into the gorgeous lunatic, but the ache was starting to convert itself into pleasure.
"Indulge me."
"I … unh. I fucking love it."
"May I use both hands?"
"Yeah."
John rather liked Sherlock putting the dirty things he wanted to do to John in question form. Even if his intonation was imperious. No, especially if his intonation was imperious. John didn't want to think about what this meant about his own mental wiring.
Sherlock wrapped one hand around John's balls and stroked his length with the other. John, who had taught him this, mentally high-fived himself for his pedagogical skills.
"May I touch the slit?"
"Yeah. Mmm. Oh. Fuck."
Sherlock made a rumbling sound in his throat. "One thing at a time. May I chew your ear?"
"What?"
"Your ear."
God only knew where Sherlock had picked the ear thing up. Actually, did God know? He was omniscient, John's Anglican upbringing had been fairly clear on that, but he was also omnipotent, and there were things about Sherlock that any all-powerful being would be well advised to delete.
"I don't think … it's not really …" Sherlock dragged his thumb from John's frenulum to his slit and back a few times, and suddenly, all of his ideas sounded brilliant again. "Ungh. All right. Go ahead. What the he—"
Without taking his hands off John's testicles and hardness, Sherlock bent his mouth to John's ear and nibbled.
"Sherlock. Shit." The nibbling thing was better than expected. "Keep doing tha—"
Sherlock obliged for a while. Then he took John's ear lobe between his teeth, held it just long enough to make the capillaries sing, and let go. John trembled. For about the fortieth time that day, he thought about what it would be like to have sex with his roommate.
John was fairly sure he could extrapolate how Sherlock would fuck from the way he walked across a room. He considered Sherlock's sinuous grace, his acrobatic body, the majesty of his hips. It had to be said that the man moved beautifully. His bull-in-a-china shop demeanor was purely a function of his personality; there was a dancer's elegance behind it. Whether in control or out of it, he was a force to be reckoned with. While not immune to the learning curve, Sherlock – terrifying, gorgeous, unwavering by default – promised to be a Vesuvius of sex. John let out a groan. As the stand-in for the hapless villagers, he was in big trouble.
Of course, not only did Sherlock identify, out loud, what John was thinking about, but he airily instructed him to continue.
"It's fine. Go ahead."
"Sherlock."
The sultry voice was low and insinuating and very close to John's ear. "I know you want to have sex with me. How badly do you want to push me down on the deck right now? You could. I'd let you. I don't care who's watching."
"Fucking hell. Sher—"
"I know you like the sounds I make. How do you imagine I'll sound the first time you fuck me?"
"Oh God."
Still rubbing John's cock, Sherlock gave a nod of expectations met. "That ought to set you off. Between your aural fixation and your virgin kink, I'm not sure how you'll stand it."
John was speechless. Encouraged by Sherlock's dirty mouth and his probing fingers, the pleasure that had rooted itself in his balls was beginning to send fresh green shoots upward. They curled and looped inside him like the tendrils of pea plants.
Sherlock tried an exploratory moan to see what John thought of it. The moan was breathy and surprised and desperate.
John wasn't sure how he was standing it now. "Sherlock. Sherlock, please."
"I want to finish you off. Will you permit that?"
"Yes. God, yes."
"You're beautiful," said Sherlock, and it seemed a very strange thing to say, because that was what John always – yes, always, whether he was arguing or theorizing or just generally being a cock – thought about him. "So beautiful, John. Let me see you. Let me feel you."
Sherlock was a fast learner. The more he touched John, the more nimble and knowing his fingers became.
John didn't think he could last much longer. He closed his eyes, leaned back against the wall, and delivered himself into his partner's hands. One cupped his balls, probably examining the tightness there, while the other teased his shaft and swollen cockhead, sliding over John's most sensitive spots and coaxing the ecstasy from him. John threw his head back, utterly ravished by the sensations.
"So good. Unhhh. Sh'lock. I'm …"
This thing, this pleasure that Sherlock had wrought for him: it made John's thighs shake and his head tip back, made his muscles clench and his teeth clamp down. It pulsed in his balls like a heartbeat. There was no way to stop it. It spiraled and soared. Its liquid power forced its way up his length and out the slit, making him shudder and cry out. His cock jerked once, twice, three times, squeezing out the last of it, and then there was bonelessness, weightlessness, and pure, elemental rapture. The pleasure toyed with him, using his body as its conduit, and he gave himself up to it, let it buffet him like a storm at sea. He rose and fell with the waves. They tossed and submerged him and brought him to shore, and in the aftermath, he lay panting and naked and as wrecked as any castaway, safe at last in the cove of his lover's arms.
Lover, thought John, groggily. He turned the word over several times in his mind.
Fuck.
A/N: Warm thanks to everyone who's favorited or commented. If you've written me while logged in, I've written you back, but if not, please accept my heartfelt gratitude for reading and reviewing.
Extra shout-outs go, in reverse alphabetical order, to strangegibbon, who's just completed the extraordinary Sherlock novel "In Memoriam"; my wise, witty friend inconcvbl; and fandom Boswell plus all-around sweetheart arianedevere. Also, the word "undefended" is unapologetically stolen from snarryfool, who is a marvel.
