Chapter 10: The Price of Sentiment

"His body was urgent against her, and she didn't have the heart anymore to fight...She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up."

― D.H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

"I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed."
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

Her eyes opened sluggishly, slowly trying to come to grips with the surrounding darkness. Her mind was groggy, unable to focus on anything and try as she might she couldn't seem to concentrate on her surroundings at all.

The only constants in her confused daze were the chilliness of the surface beneath her tired body and the vast impenetrable darkness that closed in around her from all sides.

With great effort she raised her right hand, gingerly touching the side of her face. It was wet, coated with a thick sticky liquid whose strong metallic odor could only identify it as blood. She opened her mouth to scream, to call out for help, but her lips were cracked and her throat parched with a painful dryness that prevented her from uttering anything more than a pitiful, hoarse cry.

A few hours ago...

She felt the warmth of his lithe body wrapped around her, his arm draped tightly over her waist and his fingers splayed out on the soft skin of her upper abdomen.

The contact between their heated bodies was not something she could easily get used to.

When she chanced a look at him, she saw that his eyes were closed and his features open and relaxed. A few locks of dark chocolate brown hair fell carelessly over his eyes and this time she couldn't resist the powerful urge to softly brush the silky tufts away, her fingers trailing over the smooth skin of his cheekbones.

Molly wondered how he could sleep so easily when she was so fully alert and only able to think about the way his naked skin felt pressed up so intimately against hers, their limbs so entangled that neither could move without the other.

Of course, after what she experienced with him, she supposed this could not be something new for him. In all the years she had known him she had never asked, mostly because she didn't want to know and partly because everyone else around him was convinced that he was simply not interested in this sort of thing.

A small bitter part of her wondered if it had been with that woman. Irene Adler. Molly remembered her name just like she remembered what the woman did for a living. She tried not to put too much thought into it, lest she end up gripped by insecurities and doubts. It was none of her business, that's what she told herself repeatedly and by the thirtieth time, she had almost succeeded in convincing herself. Almost.

The shutters on the three large windows adorning the northern wall were shut, keeping the room in relative darkness. She wondered what time it was but when she reached for her alarm clock, her hand made contact with the empty surface of the nearby nightstand, reminding her that she was not currently in her bedroom. Or in her bed.

Molly took a few agonizing moments to muster her resolve, before gently trying to pry his body away from hers. It proved far more difficult than she ever would have expected and not solely because she, herself was reluctant to step out of the protection of his arms. Even in sleep his hold on her was impossibly strong, bordering on painfully unyielding in its nature and disturbingly possessive to the point where she wanted to forget all her misgivings and all her worries and simply submit to him wholly.

And yet she knew that if she valued her self-preservation even a little bit, she had to get away from him as soon as possible. The longer she stayed, tucked safely in the comfort of his arms, the more harm she did to herself. It would be better if she chose to leave now out of her own accord, rather than wait for him to wake up and send her away. Because as loath as she was to sound so melodramatic, she honestly didn't think she had it in her to go on after watching him push her away.

Finally managing to disentangle herself from his vice like hold on her, or at least disentangle herself physically from him, she stood up carefully. Her body was sore, pleasantly so she was forced to admit, and the memory of last night still lingered on her flushed skin in more ways than one.

Molly padded quietly to the en-suite bathroom attached to the room, grabbing a folded towel from the towel rack near the sink and closing the door behind her.

Knowingly leaving the door unlocked.

The wide rectangular mirror covering the wall space above the bathroom sink was not as large as the one in her own bathroom, but it was nevertheless large enough for her to notice the state her body was in. The pale skin of her throat was decorated with numerous bruises slowly losing their dark purple color and the expanse of her collarbone was peppered with the occasional love bite and dark red mark.

Her eyes moved lower, observing the hand shaped bruises on her lower arms and hips. Molly blushed, recalling exactly how all those marks and bruises had been placed where they were, remembering the way his lips closed around her skin and the faint pain of his teeth sinking into her soft flesh as she moaned his name.

Quickly moving away from the mirror in the hopes of escaping her current train of overly wicked and sordid thoughts, she turned the shower faucet towards the cold setting, thinking that presently a cold shower would be a very good thing.

Molly let the cold water soothe her inflamed skin and wash away the remnants of him from her body. The few drops of blood trailing down her thighs and falling on the white tiled floor were a bittersweet reminder of what she had lost. And yet despite the emotional pain that would inevitably follow once he left her, she could not find it in herself to regret her choice of finally being with him that way. She did not regret her choice of giving in.

The cascading water suddenly turned warm on her skin. She had been standing alone under the falling shower trying in futile to erase his presence from herself, while all the while knowing that even if she could somehow blot out all the physical traces he left on her, she would never be able to free herself from the hold he maintained on her.

And then he was there. Molly felt his arms wrap securely around her. His lips were on the back of her shoulders, very gently leaving a trail of bites and open mouthed kisses on her rapidly warming skin.

She grasped his hands with the intention of prying them off her. Instead her fingers held onto him, her nails digging into the pale smooth skin of his hands. She turned around to face him and her lips found his, her mouth lingering on his for a moment, before moving over his neck and throat in imitation of what he had done to her a few hours ago. No one could say she was a slow learner.

He was calm, deceptively so, and he allowed her to take the lead. For now. She knew his passiveness wouldn't last very long. Already his fingers were digging painfully into the flesh of her hips and she could feel the rhythm of his heart beating just as erratically as her own.

She felt his control snap under her deft machinations. His left hand ripped back the black and silver shower curtain, before closing around her wrist and yanking her to him.

In two small steps they were in front of the mirror.

Roughly prying her hands off him, he turned her around, her back connecting with the solid wall of his chest. His hands gripped her hands, pinning them on the cold granite surface of the counter in front of her. His movements had been so incredibly fast, leaving her reeling in confusion.

It wasn't until she felt his hands on her hips and lower back, forcefully bending her over the counter that she realized what he was about to do.

A pained cry rose involuntarily from her throat as he trust himself into her, impaling her harshly onto himself. His movements here fast, hard and deep, eliciting shameless moans and cries that she was completely helpless to suppress.

In that moment she truly didn't know which was more arousing, the pleasurable harshness with which he handled her or the way she could see his eyes looking back at her in the surface of the mirror in front them as he drove himself into her again and again until she thought she would pass out whether from pleasure or pain or both.

Very distantly she wondered if there wasn't something disturbingly wrong with her.

She felt the tell-tale signs of what he had been the first to teach her, slowly washing over her and she made to close her eyes as the ecstasy of what he was doing to her finally caught up with her.

"Don't." His voice was cruelly commanding and impossibly low.

His hand left her lower back long enough to tangle in her long hair, pulling it back and forcing her to keep looking in his eyes still reflected in the mirror in front of them.

It was too much. She moaned, her hands gripping the cold surface of the counter for support until her knuckles turned white.

Her eyes were locked with his as she lost herself completely, her cries loud enough to echo all through the otherwise quiet apartment.

He continued to drive himself into her, his pace unmerciful and entirely unforgiving on her delicate form. He groaned, his deep voice reverberating all around her until its sound was permanently branded in her mind.

She had never seen him so out of control.

With a final thrust, he emptied himself deep inside her. His movements ceased and he leaned, exhausted against her on the dark grey granite.

Molly felt weightless as if all her strength had left her, as if she wasn't residing in her body any longer.

She lowered her face until its sides touched the surface of the counter. His forearms were positioned right next to her flushed face and with a tentative hand she reached for his fingers. He let her wrap her hand in his, his fingers squeezing her own tightly in silent reassurance.

His weight over her as he leaned his body against her own should have been stifling, making her want to move from under him. Instead her hand tightened around his own, holding onto him.

The echoing ringing of the land-line was only a distant irritation at first, but eventually the incessant ringing became too much to ignore.

She had never thought stepping away from someone could ever be so incredibly painful. Her movements were slow, slow enough to give the accursed phone a chance to stop ringing. Eventually she was forced to acknowledge defeat.

Finally, she found the strength to move away from him. On the threshold to the bedroom, his fingers curled around her arm keeping her in place. She saw him looking down incredulously at his hand clutching onto her as if he wasn't sure what he had just done. Then his eyes found hers and Molly didn't know if she wanted to try and decipher all the different emotions battling viciously behind the sea of green-blue.

He released her abruptly, as if her skin had burned him. When he looked at her next, his face was controlled, his expression as unreadable as ever and she knew she had lost him.

Molly walked to the small corner table, picking up the cordless phone and raising it to her ears.

"Hello. Yes. I see. Isn't there anyone else who can cover for him?... Ok, of course I'll be right there."

Putting the phone down she turned to tell Sherlock, but he had stepped into the shower, a thin layer of steam already filling up the room. Molly wrestled with the idea of maybe, possibly stepping into the shower with him. But when she thought about what had happened the last time they were in there together, she knew that unless she wanted to show up extremely late for work, she would be forced to shower on her own and as far away from him and his touch as possible.

For the first time since she had picked her chosen career, Molly Hooper hated her job.

Feedback is as always greatly appreciated. A special thank you to Kathmak for all the support and helpful input.