Welcome to chapter 4, dear readers. Well, I think we are getting somewhere now – could be about to get steamy! However, I think after this week's regular postings, there might be a bit of a break - I'm still working on the next phase, and I'm not exactly sure whether I am getting the tone right, and also where I am going with it. Trying to take note of your feedback as I go along too. But I wanted to leave you on a bit of a cliff-hanger at this point. Please let me know what you think!
The week that followed was normal by any standards, except Sherlock's. Un-distracted by a case, he writhed in internal misery. John had not made any further request for a good night kiss. He had not referred to the encounter again. Sherlock had watched him with an unparalleled intensity but could not work out what was going on inside the little man's head. By the time seven days had elapsed, Sherlock was beside himself.
He was sitting on the sofa working his way through a particularly turgid monograph on the life cycle of the grave fly when things came to a head. For once, John was not watching tv. He was fiddling about trying to mend the handle of his briefcase, which had broken on the bus on the way home from the surgery, spilling papers all over the bus floor. His mood had not improved since he got back, and the more he wrestled with the handle, the worse he huffed and puffed. And the more pink his face became, the more Sherlock squirmed in his chair, tortured by the Priapic erection he had been carrying around all week. John looked so utterly shaggable, he realised, and then was shocked by the use of such a term inside his own head. But it was true, the way the doctor had flushed even to the tips of his neat little ears. In the end, Sherlock couldn't stand it anymore.
'John, there's something I need to tell you.'
John growled as the plastic halves of the handle came apart yet again despite liberal applications of Superglue.
'Damn it!' he shouted at it, and threw it across the room in frustration. 'What is it, Sherlock?'
Sherlock wriggled miserably. This was definitely not the right moment. John would be unlikely to be receptive in this mood.
'I have some acetone if you would like to clean the two halves properly.'
'Do you know what? I just can't be arsed!' The tube of superglue skittered across the table top and John folded his arms so tightly he looked as if he had tied himself in knots. No, definitely not the right time, Sherlock concluded. He huffed and tried to concentrate on the gravefly's pupation stage.
John got up and started crashing about in the kitchen. Sherlock heard him pull a bottle of beer from the fridge and slam the door. There was the hiss as he prized off the lid. He came back, leant on the door sill petulantly, and slurped at the bottle, his lips encircling its neck so erotically that Sherlock nearly dropped his book.
'I need a new briefcase,' John said, as much to himself as to his flatmate. 'Make do and mend can only get you so far.'
Sherlock twisted in his seat, feeling his cheeks redden.
'What's up with you?' John asked him.
Sherlock grunted. He crossed his long legs, trying to hide his embarrassment. John growled something, and stormed back into the kitchen. Sherlock heard the base of the beer bottle skitter in the sink, and the cupboard door open. He knew that sound. John never went into that cabinet unless he was desperate. It was where he kept his whisky. For medicinal purposes, he always claimed to his flatmate. John only drank it when he'd had a bad nightmare, if Sherlock had been especially stupid and risked his own life on a case, or when they had both barely escaped from some near miss with their lives. He remembered the whisky at the Cotswold pub, the frisson of peated scotch on John's tongue during that goodnight kiss. John must be really upset about something to have got the bottle out. Conscience pricking, Sherlock levered himself out of his chair, and waddled to the door, trying hard to hide his swollen crotch with the book.
Glass clattered on glass. The crystal tumbler Harry had given John the previous Christmas chimed as John poured an extensive slug, his hand shaking so much that the neck knocked on the rim. John picked up the glass, hefted it in his palm, and knocked the contents back, hissing air in through his teeth as the spirit burned its way down his throat. Sherlock was treated once again to the view of the sinews in John's throat standing out, the stretch of muscles in his jaw, and for one dreadful moment, Sherlock's eroticised brain transferred that over-extension to an image of John gulping something entirely different, and his legs nearly buckled under him.
John hadn't finished, however. He slammed the glass back onto the crumb-strewn counter and sloshed more scotch into it, several fingers deep. And knocked it straight back.
Now Sherlock was getting genuinely concerned.
'John?' The name came out as a whisper.
John struggled with the burn again, grimacing, his head down, hands holding onto the work surface so hard that his knuckles turned white.
'John, whatever it is-'
'Jesus, Sherlock,' John growled.
Sherlock waited, suddenly afraid. Afraid that his world was about to cave in, because there was something very scary about his flatmate when he was like this, brooding, almost foreboding. He watched the muscles in the doctor's jaw working, teeth grinding. Something was coming, and Sherlock was almost ready to scream with the tension of waiting for it.
John cleared his throat. 'What are we doing here?'
'What- what do you mean?' Sherlock realised he sounded hesitant. Shaky, even.
John didn't look up. 'Us,' he said. His breathing was very laboured, every muscle in his body tense. 'I need to know. Because I'm in deep here, Sherlock. Really, very deep. So if you are going to break my heart, I'd really rather you got on and did it right now, so we can get it over with, because so help me, I can't stand this any longer.'
For a moment, the detective couldn't breathe, actually could not make his lungs inflate, or his nostrils dilate and suck in air. His heart was pounding in his ears. His precious brain seemed to have gone offline. He rummaged about, trying to work out some kind of coherent response, but since nothing came, he gave in and let his body take over. His foot extended, as if to take a step forward.
'Stop, Sherlock. Just stop.' John's voice was taut, thrilling. 'One more step, and I won't be able to stop myself. One more step and we can never go back. Never. You need to understand that.'
And that was the moment he finally looked up and fixed the detective with his steely stare. His eyes had changed colour, from their usual delicate blue-grey to a dazzling stormy indigo. A small vein under his eye was standing out, throbbing. The crests of his cheeks were pink, the rest of his face drained and ashen.
'What will you do, John?' Sherlock heard his own voice and realised words were coming out without any conscious intervention on his brain's part. 'If I step forward, what will you do?'
John's big chest was heaving. He was still clinging onto the cabinet's surface like a drowning man, glaring at Sherlock. But then he let go and turned his body, standing up straight, and Sherlock felt the full force of his charisma, that power that had carried his men into battle with him, the physical, almost palpable sensation of masterful energy that fumed off an apparently little man who had suddenly turned into a god before his eyes.
'I will take you, Sherlock. I will possess you.' His voice was husky and deep, rasping and oozing sex. 'I will rip every stitch of cloth off you and I will lick every inch of your skin, and I mean every inch. I will kiss you until you can't breathe, and I will throw you on that bloody kitchen table and fuck you to within an inch of your life, and when you come, Sherlock, and you will, eventually – because I will make damn sure it takes a lifetime and that you are begging me for mercy by the time I let you – when you come, it will be my name you scream, because you will be mine, Sherlock, inside and out, now and forever, and I will never, ever let you go.'
How Sherlock did not faint at that point he could not understand. He had gone beyond conscious thought, beyond any kind of rationality or meaning. It was the siren song of John's voice that he responded to, passing into a kind of Nirvana of desire, surrendering himself body and soul to the man in front of him.
'Yes, John,' he heard himself murmur. 'Yes.'
And he took that last step forward.