Immense thanks to everyone who has commented, I'm so grateful for your support, and such useful crit. I've taken account of them in this new chapter, so I hope I'm getting a little closer to the arrogant Sherlock we all know and love. And yes, I'm holding out on the full shagging until the final moment. Just a little titillation today. Enormous thanks to the sainted verityburns and Atlin Merrick, masters of the genre for their inspiration for this thread. You are wonderful.

He had no idea where he had been when he fetched up at the little coffee shop in Spitalfields around lunchtime. His feet hurt. He had been walking for four hours, but it felt like forty days and forty nights. To begin with he had kept walking to get away from John, but he had to go on to distract himself from the gruelling pain in his thighs and glutes, unused to such targeted exercise as they had been subjected to since John's whisky binge. And, he had to admit, from the searing throb in his backside that resulted from repeated penetrations, however blissfully erotic they had been at the time. His bum hurt and he kept walking because he couldn't bear to sit down. In the end he had no choice – it was sit down or fall down. Luckily the coffee bar had tall stools, and he perched on the edge of one with relief and sipped at a cappuccino.

The coffee tasted oily in his mouth. There was no pleasure in it, no pleasure in anything much without John, he realised. John and pleasure went together in his mind now. Followed by the sour taste of betrayal and jealousy. He was miserable. He wanted John but not the John stuck in his head, the John who had fucked someone else, the John who had kept that secret from him.

Why had he not seen it before? It was so starkly obvious. John was a sensual creature, a man who inhabited his body as thoroughly as Sherlock inhabited his mind. It was only natural that he should have taken it to places that Sherlock's own spare frame didn't even know existed. At least until last night.

The movie reel played in his mind over and over again. John's strong, capable hands on his skin. John's mouth. Oh God, John's mouth! The strength in his hips and thighs. The ecstasy.

He'd been as good as his word, that compact little man, with his sensual mouth and his hungry fingers. Sherlock had given himself up without another word, and been swept away on the tidal wave of John's desire. Thrust onto his back on the kitchen table, cups and plates flying, John had scrambled up onto the tabletop on his hands and knees and then ravished – that was the only word for it – Sherlock's mouth. Then he had gripped Sherlock's shirt and ripped it open, buttons pinging left and right.

And then he had ravished Sherlock's body too. With his mouth. With his hands. With his skin. And with his cock. Oh God, that cock! How had he failed to work that one out? He'd lived with the little doctor for months, watched him intently all that time, thought he knew every curve and indentation, at least on his clothed form, but somehow John had managed to conceal that considerable girth. Perhaps that was what those ghastly sweaters were for. When Sherlock had taken John in his mouth, his jaw had ached from over-extension, and he'd gagged from the sheer volume of him. When Sherlock had taken him inside his body, his brain had virtually exploded with sensory input.

'God, John, you're so bloody big!'

'Flatterer!'

It had been Sherlock's last coherent sentence of the night.

It was only afterwards, after the white storm of passion had stilled, after they had sunk into torpor amidst sweat-soaked sheets, that Sherlock's mind had begun to function again, and the red flags it had been waiving all along suddenly made sense.

John had done this before.

With someone else.

Sherlock doubled up over his coffee, and groaned.

'Are you alright, love?' A woman sipping a tall latte at the table next to him looked concerned.

'Indigestion,' he croaked.

'Glass of milk, that's what you want,' the woman told him, knowledgably.

Not that kind of milk, Sherlock thought. His belly ached, but it was not for food or chalk tablets. It was for John.

What had he done? He'd messed it up, good and proper this time, as their old nanny used to tell him when he'd been naughty. As usual. Just inches from the thing he most wanted in all the world, and his stupid jealousy had got the better of him.

He tried to straighten up, body and mind, nostrils still full of the memory of John's scent, that rich aroma of sweat and semen and wet earth that so thrilled him. Think, Sherlock, Think! What do you really want?

The answer came back like a shout inside his skull.

JOHN!

So, does it matter that he's been with another man – maybe other men, plural? He's been with women too, after all. Why does it matter about the men more?

Sherlock knew that too. Really, he was being unusually self aware this morning, he congratulated himself. Maybe it was the meat injection in the arse, he smiled, remembering John's crude little phrase.

The other man/men mattered because even if John didn't compare them, Sherlock did. He needed to know John wanted him more. He needed to know he was better in bed. He needed to know he was better – full stop.

John's words came back to him:

Look, it was just one affair, and it didn't mean anything … You cling to whoever is nearest, but what you're really doing is clinging onto life.

It didn't mean anything. How could Sherlock be sure? He couldn't, that was the gamble. That was what made it dangerous. But didn't he love danger? Wasn't he addicted to it, the way he had been to heroin?

Then John's other words came into his head, those passionate words in the kitchen, John's voice husky with lust.

You will be mine, Sherlock, inside and out, now and forever, and I will never, ever let you go.

Now and forever. Inside and out.

That was what he wanted. Next to that, a few shags in a dusty trench on the other side of the world were meaningless.

Oh, John.

An enormous truck rumbled past in the street, rattling the coffee shop windows, and suddenly Sherlock was back in London, back in the real world, the memories crowding his brain instantly dissipated like so much mist.

He'd fucked up. He'd risked losing John because a stupid fit of jealousy. He had to find a way to make it right. A solution. He looked around himself for inspiration.

He used to like Spitalfields in the old days, before it became trendy. He had enjoyed its seediness, that broken down, worn out, bombed quality it had retained from decades of neglect. Now, it had been colonised by media whores and bankers who liked loft living and Mies van der Rohe chairs. The shops he could see from his perch said it all. An art gallery, the showroom of an up and coming furniture designer, an organic deli, and a luxe boutique specialising in high end lingerie and designer sex toys – iFucks, John would probably call them. Oh, and then there was –

And it was then that the idea formed in his head, faultless, sharp edged and irrefutable, reflecting the light of his own brilliance as surely as the lead crystal of John's whisky tumbler. The perfect solution.