(*)*(*)
Strain, that's what it is. Stress and strain. His last nerve, Sherlocked. His peace, cut up. Also Sherlocked.
By the approach of noon the doctor is well ahead, having triumphed over the irascible Colonel and settled into a nice, easy rhythm. Having had a bit of a heart-to-heart, 'clear the air' with his landlady, first thing that same morning, and trotted away down the steps of 221B with a remarkably clear conscience.
Having arranged a luncheon date with a very pretty lady to look forward to, as well. Except—
There's something about Mary, as they say (John chokes on his own spit when he catches himself actually thinking that phrase; oh, my! He should be strung up for his markedly odd sense of the ridiculous, really). Oh, but she's really lovely, Mary is. A lovely person, a lovely girl. But.
Sweet-natured, equipped with a dreadnought-dark funny bone that seems to match up to John's, and delightfully female. All curvy; nice calves, generous bosom. Er, still….
Willing and able, and quite understanding of John's various small frailties, his small fails as a human being, a gentleman. The hole in his existence he's still recuperating from; all that he does not speak and will not speak of, ever. Caring and quiet about it, never flaunting her knowledge, in just the way John most appreciates. Except…
Patient like Job and amazingly tolerant of John's flatmate, not that she's seen much of him, nor will if John has his way. An angel. However—
There's something about Mary that is not, well…not Sherlock.
Sherlock is Sherlock and there's no getting round it. And it's Sherlock's prick John's musing over on the periphery of his workaday mind—and has been all morning, despite 'clearing the air'—and not Mary's rueful-sweet smile.
Perhaps he's not quite shaken off all the fury he felt.
Because, curse Sherlock Holmes for always questioning, for always wanting to know how and why and what for, all the bleeding particulars of any given situation. Curse him for prying at John's brain like sticky fingers thrust into a lowly crackerjack box and digging away doggedly for the prize.
No—fuck. John swears, silently, grimacing.
He's a lunch date in just an hour. Hmmm…maybe French? There's that new bistro round the corner from the clinic that all the nurses at Bart's rave over. That would be nice, probably. They likely do chicken of some sort; John does like chicken.
In some sort of fancy-pants sauce. Right. Sauce—he likes saucy foods, he does. Likes the feel on his tongue, the buttery smoothness…ah!
Bugger.
Coq au vin versus cock du Sherlock should be no contest when it comes to whetting John's flagging appetite, but it isn't.
It's fucking disturbing; he'd thought he'd worked his way through this, courtesy his worldly-wise landlady. A prickly path, a quagmire, navigated nicely. But….no. Apparently not. Evidence suggests 'not'.
There's evidence in his pants, damn it all.
John squirms a bit on his seat cushion, sending his chair skittering up tight upon the edge end of his desk. There's a coil of heat in his gut, rising reluctantly; he can feel it. There's a flush he can feel spreading up the column of his neck. He feels…he feels feverish.
He hates that. Shouldn't be happening at all. But…it is. And god help him.
His very hand refuses to leave go its sense-memory of another man's tumescence. He's gripping a biro but it feels hot, his palm, as if he's burnt it. And not some 'other man's prick', either—Sherlock's.
John's chest is tight under the white coat's emblazoned cadeceus. No—his ribcage is heaving slightly, due to his brand-new breathing pattern. For god's sake!
John has a date in less than an hour. His flatmate knows nothing of it, so likely it'll go swimmingly. He has hopes. Another step down the road with Mary, which is a damned fine turn-up for the books.
Or…is it?
He's clammy-damp with a fine sheen of perspiration under his clothes. If he glances in the mirror, he'd likely be treated to sight of a curiously uneasy John Watson, a John who is undeniably aroused. Red of face, lips parted and chapping from all his licking at them. Bitten at nervously; pupils blown. Well…he does have a lunch date he's anticipating….
It could very well be all due to dear Mary. But.
It isn't—it so isn't.
The detective is proportional. John has confirmed the evidence of his eyes with his fist. He is thin but he's fit. Boney in places; a man could count his ribs but the skin over them is soft, soft as a baby's bum. Bugger, but his bum is as soft as a baby's, full and plump, nicely firm. His hair is also soft and curly; seal-coloured hanks of satin falling through sifting fingertips, and his eyes are the eyes of a siren, an otherworldly alien, a lost boy.
John sways where he sits. Clutches at his half empty 'in' tray with slippery fingertips, reaching blindly for another chart. He feels a bit sick, actually.
His voice is made of smoked cognac and dark caçao, and he asks the very worst of questions with that voice of his; makes all manner of difficult demands upon his only mate. He can, it seems, do all this even without speaking aloud.
Sherlock: it's a language. One John can hear even without ears.
What's it like?
Bloody hell. It's like Sherlock. It has always been like Sherlock and it always will be. John lives in a world flavoured by the adjective Sherlock, ruled over by the proper noun Sherlock and, fuck, but he lives driven.
"Oh," he breathes to the empty room. "My god."
What he wouldn't give for Sherlock's art of deletion.
But he's a man, a normal man, really, and he cannot forget. Not for an instant.
Denial's a river in Egypt. No doubt the archeologist bloke with no face would've known. John knows John's trousers are growing ever more uncomfortable the longer he entertains the diamond-clear recollection of a very important part of Sherlock's absurdly perfectly proportional anatomy, jerking rigid in his hand, and not so many hours ago he's any hope of the memory blurring through attrition.
Sherlock. It was ever so hot and long and hard like obsidian, thick of girth near the base and then tapering nicely. There's a curve to it, which a tiny part of John had found exquisitely charming. Sherlock had issued the very best of small sounds when John had stroked it, when he had milked it, and when he had run the pad of his thumb up the undervein. Worse even than that, there's John's total recall of that snarky, smart-mouthed prat thrashing wildly under his tongue, 'neath his best mate's weight thrown over—hiding but not hiding at all. Under cover, really, acting like any other bloke surreptiously having his rocks off. And the huge tit apparently had been very much liking the whole damned experience, going by those noises, those so very pretty noises. Getting into it, getting off.
"Bloody. Hell."
The tongue which ushers that voice into the world, the soft palette? Delicious. Steamy and outright brilliant.
John literally cannot recall a single snog he's enjoyed more.
He has to moan aloud when he realizes this. He's a date in under an hour, with a very nice woman. A woman he's ever so fond of.
It would be awfully nice to feel shame, John feels, apropos his own abrupt, unwanted reaction (a heady and quite inappropriate swelling of the groin; all observable symptoms attendant upon an upswell of raging physical desire), but he cannot seem to bring himself to do so.
Shame is alien; Sherlock is never bothered by shame. Well…the once, maybe. Alright, twice.
Shame, though. Circumstances seem to be against it. There's Sherlock himself, for one, looming large in the doctor's mind' eye, intruding rudely upon John's obligatory but dull review of his upcoming patient files.
Only the six more and then he's out the door, collecting Mary on the way, and they'll have a very nice lunch, he's certain.
But not coq au vin. He doesn't even know what he was thinking, considering French cuisine. Mary would never like it; she was a plain meat pasty-and-a-pint girl and that was super.
…French, huh?
John has to wince. He knows all about subliminal urges.
Oh, yes, and curse kindly old Mrs Hudson, with her 'married ones next door' and her 'I always was of the opinion he cares for you, dear, much more than either of you ever realized' and her sly 'and you, for him'. And her bloody knowing smiles and half-winks and hand-patting. John could do without snappily dressed little old ladies who seem to understand his inner John more than he understands himself, thanks.
A pox on the so-lovely Mary, too, for not being just a tad bit more aggressive. How many times now have they not quite or only nearly? Too many, that's what. One would assume John-and-Mary weren't really all that.
"God. This can't. I shan't, I won't. No!"
John shudders, closing his eyes against the clean and simple lines of his exam room. It's so beautifully sterile, nothing like the flat.
He's always shied away from deducing himself and Mary. Many a time has he avoided indulging in such a Sherlockian occupation. He's not bored in the slightest. His relationship with Mary is exciting, never tedious.
He has nothing to feel the slightest bit guilty for, just as Mrs Hudson said. 'Poor dear Sherlock', she'd said, 'he never seems to know quite what to—exactly how to...?' And she'd shrugged in that speaking way she had, insinuating all manner of things and visibly allowing John to come to his own conclusions and it had been good, all good. Very good.
John nods to himself. Shrugs.
Oh, yes, that. That had been nothing, nothing to speak of or dwell on or worry over. It had been a damned hand job and a few messy smooches, nothing more. Comfort, if anything.
Fucking comfort, in reply to 'what's it like, John?'
Because John couldn't have knocked the bastard upside the head to render him unconcious and he couldn't have merely hugged the contrary git as he'd wanted to, once—no, but still.
No, sir, none of those explicitly common human reactions would be at all understood by the likes of Sherlock; that wasn't how he operated. Not his plane of existence, not his ken. No, it had been required of John to be spectacularly shocking—a stab in the dark, through the heart—and it had required of him to be stunningly powerful, sufficient to send Sherlock safely off to Nod with the rest of the bloody Lost Boys.
...And if that turned John Watson into a modern-day Wendy, what the fuck, yeah?
What the bloody fuck.