Chapter Twelve: Tempest on a Jelly Bed
Promises: Men going at it.
John tumbled and tossed on a sea of dreams. His dreams smelled of Scots pine, rain, dark hollows, the secret places of the earth. He ran through the woods at night, following the sound of footsteps. Peering through the trees, he caught a glimpse of dark curls, a body like birch bark, a holly berry mouth. A sylph, an Ariel, a creature of the air trapped and taken over by the forest.
"Find me," said Sherlock, and John went to him. He brought him to ground near a pool of shining water. He held him down in a bed of soft moss and pine needles, this wild thing, this airy spirit. He felt Sherlock's heart pounding against his rib cage, marveled to watch the pale chest rise and fall under his fingertips.
He wasn't human. He couldn't be. Men were blocky, earthbound things, creatures of right angles. Sherlock was soaring and ethereal, a creature of arcs and slants. Naked, he was a fugue, his quicksilver themes repeating themselves as one ripple repeats another. The shape of his almond eyes found its echo in his pink and oval areolas. The shape of his lower lip recalled the curves of his hair, his arse, his awakening cock. He was beautiful, and he quickened John's breath and stirred his desire.
John sucked his fingers. He prepared a place for himself inside the air sprite's body. He entered, and Sherlock closed tightly around him. They rocked and tossed like trees in a storm, and the wind spoke through them in moans and whispers.
"Free me," said Sherlock. "I've been here too long. Let me find release."
Trembling, John did as he was told. Sherlock cried out. John felt him rising, felt him lifting up, freed at last from his enchantment. Now it was John who was trapped, confined in the dark forest.
But the sprite wouldn't leave. "Come with me," he said, and he stretched his long arms down to pull at John, and then John was also rising, spiraling upwards into his lover's kingdom of air.
"Are you about to come?" Sherlock wanted to know.
John blinked and looked around. Sherlock was lying on his side in the blackcurrant jelly bed. Positioned as the yin to John's yang, he was staring intently at John's nether regions.
John scrambled upright, moving to cover himself with his hands. His erection softened instantly, deflated by the pin of his partner's sharp gaze.
"Jesus, Sherlock, what? I don't know. No. Can you not stare at me when I'm asleep?"
"You stare at me when I'm asleep," pointed out Sherlock. John didn't ask how he knew that. It seemed like something Sherlock would know.
"That's different," said John, though how wasn't immediately obvious.
"Lie down," said Sherlock. "It's my turn to suck you."
"Blow jobs are not, strictly speaking, a turn-based activity. They're not Cluedo. Cripes. Is that why you woke me up? So I wouldn't come without your say-so?"
Sherlock looked mildly hurt.
"Of course not. I woke you up because you've been very specific that you don't want your ejaculate being turned into progeny in the ship's lab. I've found a way around that."
"Which is what, exactly?"
"I'll bring you to completion, and then I'll swallow."
"Oh, God."
"What? It's perfect. The reason the Keplerians want to harvest sperm from you is that they want to know why your DNA isn't establishing itself inside me in grand panda fashion. If you put your DNA inside me by letting me suck you, they can scan me and find it exactly where they expect it, at least in the short term. That ought to satisfy them for a while."
"And the reason you woke me up just then was …"
"Because you dislike it when I sexually overpower you, and I didn't have your consent to swallow your ejaculate as you slept. I couldn't permit you to ejaculate on your stomach, because we don't know when the Keplerians will be back with the cup. You've been very clear that you don't want your sperm to end up in their possession. The only thing to do was prevent you from ejecting any."
"That's … that's good, actually," said John, eyebrows rising in surprise. "Empathetic of you. Ethical, even."
Sherlock glared. "I know it's good."
"No, really. I'm just a bit wound up because I dreamt about you and I haven't got off since the pool and all we ever talk about is fucking and my balls are verging on indigo. Also … what if you swallow and they show up right after and still want sperm in a cup? You know, milking machine and all that? It's going to be difficult for me to give them what they want if you've already made me come."
"Mmm," said Sherlock. His silken voice wrapped itself around John like a dark, enveloping blindfold. "A risk."
"Uh-huh."
"Not safe."
"Yeah."
"Completely inadvisa—"
"Oh, shit," said John, licking his lips. "Do you have to punch all my buttons like that? 'John, it's dangerous. We couldn't possibly. Think of your leg.' Damn it, Sherlock."
"Why wouldn't I resort to that? It works."
John groaned, but he lay back down on the rippling jelly bed nonetheless. "It does," he said. "Do your worst."
"AhahaHA!" It was ten minutes later, and John was squealing in a fashion unbecoming an officer. He was still no closer to climax, but he was a lot closer to inadvertently kicking Sherlock in the head. "Stop, stop, stop."
"John? Whatever are you doing?"
"I'm being tickled half to death, you idiot. Let go."
With the air of long practice, Sherlock removed his hands and slowly held them up where John could see them. John gave himself a mental reminder to ask Sherlock more about his past dealings with law enforcement.
"You gave me to understand you preferred build up. Teasing. It's not as if I have a vast store of memorized foreplay techniques at my disposal."
"So you're what? Trying everything plus the kitchen sink to see what happens?"
As soon as the words left John's mouth, he mentally shook his head. He was. Of course he was.
Sherlock steepled his fingers. John had never seen a person steeple his fingers in mid-air before. Usually there was some kind of desk involved. Sherlock was a grandmaster in contemplative hand gestures.
"If I asked you for a full list of everything that is capable of giving you pleasure," he asked, "would you be able to supply it? Am I to believe that your former partners have hit upon everything that you might enjoy? How very resourceful of them."
"They certainly hadn't done that," said John, contemplating the events of a minute previous.
"Then how were you to know that you wouldn't like it? You didn't think you'd like the ear chewing, and you ended up asking for more."
"OK. You wanted to know what I'd like. So you were going through all the possible permutations, yeah? Which naturally led to you grabbing me by the hips, pinning me to the bed, and licking the backs of my bloody knees." All of John's crevices were ticklish, and the backs of the knees were no exception.
This summary of events appeared to offend Sherlock's sense of thoroughness. He snorted like an affronted horse. "It wasn't just the knees," he muttered.
John pinched the bridge of his nose. "Right, yes. I wouldn't want to accuse you of being unsystematic. You did lick pretty much everything else first."
"Necessary," Sherlock proclaimed. "There are variations. The back of your neck tastes like clean laundry: Orkney wool, Marks and Spencer cotton, no silk. Your elbows taste like envelopes — linen rag, handmade, wedding quality, 70 lb. weight. There's a hint of apricot in the bits behind your …"
Sherlock took in the look John was giving him and stopped in his tracks.
"This is how it is for me," he said, quietly. "I want you. I already have a sense of your mind, and now I want a sense of your body. I won't settle for anything less. I want to know the smell of your hair when it's bone dry or soaking wet, and how its scent is affected by all the gradations of humidity in between. I want to know what your scar looks like under black light, sunlight, the infrared from night-vision goggles. I want to taste you in a variety of places and in a variety of emotional states. I want to measure how fast your cuticles grow on your fingers and toes and determine whether there's a difference in the growth rate and why. I want to know everything about you. Are you expecting me to react to you differently? Because I don't think I can."
John put an arm around his partner and pulled him closer. Sherlock leaned into him and allowed his hair to be stroked.
"It's fine," said John. "It's love. I feel it too. It doesn't, um, express itself exactly like that for most people, but it's fine."
"What I did to you just now. The licking. Not good?"
John breathed deeply. "Most of it was very good. Some of it was amazing. And you did stop when I asked you to. It's just that last bit was …"
"Too intimate?"
"Too ticklish. Ticklish, Sherlock. Do you understand tickling, or did you empty that from your Mind Palace when you took out the recycling?"
From the look Sherlock was giving him, John could see that ticklishness had gone the way of common courtesy and polyester. If these things had ever taken up space in the Mind Palace, that space had long since been repapered, newly carpeted, and completely refurnished.
"Oh, for heaven's sake." John took the opportunity to further Sherlock's education by pushing him face first into the bed and climbing on top of him. Seated backwards astride his mount, he helped himself to the backs of Sherlock's knees and the soles of his elongated feet.
Sherlock's voice was no less imperious for being muffled by jelly. "I hardly see what you hope to accompli— ahahoohaHA, stop, oh God, stop."
John slid off and came to rest beside his lover, his north still facing Sherlock's south.
"Truce?" he asked.
Sherlock gazed at him with shrewd, sea glass eyes. "What about my offer?"
It turned out that John's previous partners had not discovered everything his body might find enjoyable. For example, no one had ever sixty-nined him on a jelly bed.
"Mngh," said John, his mouth full, as Sherlock brought the same level of attention to his cock that he'd previously given his knees.
Sherlock stopped mid-lick. "Don't get me off again," he said, from the vicinity of John's pelvis. "I'm focusing. You're welcome to show me where you want me to put my mouth, but then leave off."
John moved his hand towards his crotch, but Sherlock caught him by the wrist.
"Not your hand. Show me with your tongue."
"Oh? Oh." John was on board with this. "Here," he said, then licked the underside of Sherlock's cock once. It was sweetly musky at the base, but tasted different, cleaner, near the head. "Start near my balls and go up."
Sherlock licked him from base to tip. John wriggled.
"What happens if I lick in the other direction?" Sherlock wanted to know. He tried it.
"Good," said John. "Surprising. Teasing. Because it starts off as intense and then backs off. Then it goes back to being intense again."
He neglected to say, "That's not how people usually do it." Sherlock wasn't especially keen on thinking about John with other people, and anyway, the fact that people normally did something was not, to him, a recommendation.
"Your testicles are sensitive," declared Sherlock, who hadn't yet gone to town on them.
"Um, I imagine most blokes' are, yeah."
"I'm not talking about pain, I'm talking about pleasure. You told me to touch mine when I was trying to get off. Inference: that sort of attention arouses you."
"Yeah." John realized Sherlock was asking permission. "Please, don't let me stop you. Have at it."
Sherlock coaxed John's legs further apart, then buried his head between them. John could feel him snuffling about down there. Then there was the warmth and wetness of Sherlock tonguing him along the seam of his ball sack to the delicate skin behind. It felt oddly vulnerable to be spread open like this with another man between his thighs. Major Pike at FOB Keenan — John refused to think of his first name — had been happy to receive oral attention, but not willing to reciprocate.
A lack of willingness was not one of Sherlock's issues in bed. He took one of John's testicles into his inquisitive mouth and sucked on it. When John's body clenched, Sherlock made a noise of discovery, at least so far as the intervening anatomy would permit.
"Wh-what?" managed John.
Sherlock left off sucking and began trailing his fingers experimentally over the seam. "For an experienced man, you haven't had anywhere near as much oral sex as you'd like. This ties in to the fact, already established, that most of your sexual assignations are short-lived. Flings, if you will. While a long-term partner would allow for the luxury of foreplay, most of your partners, perhaps sensing that the relationship would be cursory, have been determined to get straight to intercourse."
It was true that women generally preferred fucking John to sucking him, but John wasn't sure how Sherlock had come to that conclusion. "How do you figure?"
"John, look at the size of you. Not to mention the shape. What fling would be willing to settle for having you in his or her mouth?"
John groaned — partly from exasperation, and partly from the pleasure Sherlock was wreaking upon him with his fingers. The man knew how to take liberties. He had left off playing with John's sack and was stroking the cleft of his arse, taking a moment to run his thumb proprietarily over the hole.
"Is this about my oversized knob again? Shit, don't answer that. It is."
Sherlock rubbed a cheekbone against the accoutrement in question. Elsewhere, his thumb made insinuating circles. "'Oversized,' doctor? I'd say 'optimal.'"
John's face felt hot. In fact, a lot of John felt hot. Having his partner's stiff and rather stunning erection at eye level did nothing to mitigate that.
"Ungh. Optimal for what? I thought you didn't know anything about..." Sherlock's busy hands were making it hard to think.
"I don't. But people like novelty, and my memories of boarding school reveal that your dimensions are nothing if not novel. Lavish." Sherlock lowered his voice into the dark register reserved for conspiracy. "Good for getting into hard to reach places," he observed.
Given a cup of tea, John would have spat it out. Without one, he was resigned to coughing up air.
Sherlock raised a triumphant eyebrow. "More sucking?"
"Please," managed John.
Abandoning his experiments with facial frottage, Sherlock took John into his hot, wet, perfectly wicked mouth.
Good, thought John. Glorious. Extraordinary. Sherlock didn't have practice going for him, but he would put his tongue absolutely anywhere. John wondered how the man had survived years of chemistry experiments. He seemed like the sort of bloke who would lick the spoon. On a vessel devoid of spoons, he would lick John, and he did so with enthusiasm.
He began by lapping at the slit. John twisted his hips, anxious for more contact, and Sherlock gave it to him, suckling sweetly at the tip.
"Oh God," said John. He never wanted to be anywhere else but where he was. He would have new business cards printed up: John Watson, MD, Sherlock Holmes's mouth, constellation of Cygnus, NW 5.67 quadrillion.
John propped himself up on one elbow to watch as Sherlock's mouth moved lower. He gentled John's foreskin with his lips, moving it incrementally back and forth over the purplish head.
Fuuuuuck, thought John. Everything felt about a hundred times dirtier when Sherlock did it. John wondered why that was. Perhaps it was because he was still, in some respects, a virgin, and he set John's parthenophilia alight. Or perhaps it was because he was, hands-down, the most gorgeous person John had ever been with. With his dark curls, slim, ivory body, and pomegranate mouth, he was like something off a Greek vase – the raunchy kind, the kind one passed by a few times at the British Museum so as not to be caught staring. It was difficult to look at him and not think of sex. He was just that kind of Rorschach blot.
But mostly, John decided, it was because the man was just so damned engaged. As far as Sherlock was concerned, if something was worth doing, it was worth doing in a fit of mania and possibly while on fire. Most things were not worth doing, and he ignored them, but if he were interested in something, that one thing would command his complete attention.
What interested him at the moment was John. He displayed that interest by flickering his tongue against John's frenulum and hollowing his cheeks.
"Oh God oh God oh God," said John. He had tasted Sherlock there too. Obviously, Sherlock had liked it, because he'd committed the move to memory. John thought about Sherlock coming, thought about how he'd sounded during orgasm, and suddenly, maintaining a vigilant posture seemed like too much effort. John collapsed onto his side, offering himself up to the onslaught.
"On your back," said Sherlock, and John obeyed the order. He lay in the concavity of the jelly bed, ready for whatever Sherlock wanted to give him.
Still facing south to John's north, Sherlock climbed over him on all fours, allowing the gleaming tip of his cock to graze John's lips as he did so. John opened his mouth to take it in, but Sherlock raised his hips until he was out of reach.
"Concentrating," he said, and buried his face in John's crotch.
The position was tantalizing. Like a man tormented by the gods, John could see everything but reach nothing. He could have raised his head to suck on his partner's bits, but Sherlock's tone of voice had indicated that he was to lie back. So he did, enjoying the overhanging vista and the scent of his lover's arousal. Meanwhile, Sherlock sucked him like a man inspired.
John had sometimes felt unsure about the shape of his equipment. As Sherlock had pointed out, the difference between the girth of the head and the already ample girth of the shaft was noticeable. "Like a baby's arm holding an apple," one of his Army mates had said. All of them, come to think of it.
It was nothing he felt like having a complex over, but he had to admit that his was a dick that looked a bit out of place in the showers. It looked completely at home now. He watched, transfixed, as his slick, shining glans met the answering opulence of Sherlock's lips.
"Mother of God," said John. "How do you feel so good? Oh, fuck. You feel marvelous, Sherlock. Fantastic."
For a man who'd never given a blowjob, Sherlock was admirably suited to the task. His lips were plump and well equipped to cushion the shaft. His long throat, its Adam's apple highlighted by a cheeky, delicious mole, was an advertisement for swallowing. John had never seen anyone who looked more magnificent with a cock in his mouth.
And the moaning. Good God. Sherlock had the temerity to moan around John's stiffness as though he were the one up to his balls in another man's welcoming body. John had the sense that his lover was not just sucking him, but tasting him. Savoring him. He had said he'd wanted to taste all of John, and he was certainly making progress.
"Talk to me," ordered Sherlock. "Tell me what it feels like."
"Gah," protested John. "What are you stopping for? Keep at it."
"Talk to me, and I will." As a gesture of good faith, Sherlock went back to doing swirly and deliriously pleasurable things with his tongue.
"Brilliant, all right? It feels brilliant. Um. When you go down on me all the way, then come back up again — unf, yeahhh, like that — it feels like sex. Not that it isn't sex, but you know. It feels like fucking." For a man who'd never had intercourse, Sherlock was doing a brilliant job of imitating it. He was all tight, wet heat and sweet, rolling undulations.
The jelly bed had its advantages. Sherlock would go down on John, and the bed would answer with a bit of recoil, forcing John deeper into his mouth. It was heaven.
"I love you," John choked out. He had meant to say, "I'm coming," but Sherlock had short-circuited his wiring for politeness and all he could speak was the truth. "Sherlock. I love you so much."
He was too small a container for the pleasure Sherlock had instilled in him. It was overflowing. He made a strangled sob as it spilled out of him and into his lover's mouth.
"Not a moment too soon," said Sherlock, having swallowed every drop. From the hallway came the unmistakable sound of squidging.
A/N: This chapter goes out with much affection to Verity Burns. Her "The Road Less Traveled" was what made me want to write fan fiction again. It was, and is, smart, beautiful, poignant, romantic, and incredibly hot. Also, as anyone who's ever met her will tell you, she's just a lovely, lovely person. Happy early birthday, sweetie.
"Pomegranate mouth" and "ivory body" are taken from Oscar Wilde's poem "The Sphinx." I love the way he writes about men. Hell, I love the way he writes about everything.
