John had never asked Mary into 221B. She didn't completely understand why the man was being so insistent; it was just a flat, after all. John hadn't been too eager to give Mary all the details.
He'd told her about him, of course, but there was no way he could explain everything. He and Mary had been dating for a year, and Mary thought it might be time to move in together, but John couldn't stand the thought of some new person in 221B, actually cooking in the kitchen instead of conducting mad experiments involving tobacco ash, actually conversing instead of standing in front of the window composing sad music on the violin. Watching crap telly with someone else. Someone stripping the yellow smiley face off the wall, filling in the bullet holes, putting up new wallpaper. Someone else sitting in his chair.
But John had decided enough was enough. It had been two years, and no amount of stubbornness or sentiment was going to bring him back now. And besides, John was serious about Mary. Very serious. He'd been carrying around an engagement ring in his pocket for months now, trying to figure out when would be a good time to pop the question, but there was always a reason not to ask. He'd taken her out for dinner the week prior at a nice place, very posh, and he'd fully intended to ask her then, but at the last minute he'd decided it hadn't felt right. It wasn't until he was falling asleep in Mary's bed that night that he'd realized why he was so uneasy. If he was serious about being with Mary—and he was—he'd have to move out of 221B. There was no way he and Mary would be able to live there—there was too much of him. They'd never be able to shag without John worrying that his, well, spirit were watching them, or something.
But that wasn't the point. He just couldn't live there forever; he had to move on. So the next day, he'd approached Mrs. Hudson and informed her that he'd be moving. She'd cried a bit, murmured something about how both her boys would soon be gone, but she'd agreed to find new tenants, and more importantly, she'd told him he could keep some of his things. The skull on the mantle. The chair.
Mrs. Hudson posted an advert on Craigslist later that day; she had a new prospective tenant by the evening. That was that. Mrs. Hudson was going to meet with him the following week. She'd invited John to meet with him as well. John had graciously accepted the invitation. He wanted to make sure whoever was going to be living in his flat wasn't a total dick.
But no matter.
As much as it pained him to admit that it was happening, John was moving on with his life. He was in the process of boxing his belongings when his phone rang, the sound echoing shrilly off the walls of the mostly-empty flat. He trudged over to the bookshelf, where he'd set his phone, and picked it up.
Mary, it read.
John pressed the "Accept Call" button.
"Hello, darling," he said flatly, looking around the flat he'd soon be leaving forever.
"Hello. You sound bloody awful. What're you up to?"
"Oh, nothing," he lied. "Just sitting around."
"I don't buy that for a second," Mary said good-naturedly. "You sound like your kitten's just died. That settles it. You're coming round, and I'm going to take you out to this charming Italian place 'round the corner. The cure for whatever is currently ailing you is almost certainly a good slice of pizza."
John could practically hear the corners of her thin pink lips turning up over the phone, and her joy was so infectious that he found himself smiling too. "Alright, see you in twenty," he said resignedly.
"Ta, love," she said, hanging up her phone.
John lowered the phone from his ear and stared down at it in wonder. How had he, he of all people, managed to wrangle such a – a…good woman? There was really no other word for Mary. She was simply good. John had never dated a woman with as much heart as she had, and believe him, he had a startlingly large database of ex-girlfriends to compare her to. He loved Mary, he really did.
Which was why he was finally going to ask her to marry him.