Sherlock kissed Irene in the same manner he approached everything else that aroused his interest: with intensity, precision, and absolute focus. Even when they both became more unbridled and aggressive there remained an element of finesse and deliberateness in the way his lips moved against hers and he tilted his face to deepen the joining of their mouths. It was very him; no other man or woman had ever kissed her in quite the same way, and she suspected that no one else had ever been kissed in quite the same way by Sherlock Holmes, either.
Still, she liked it best, and it thrilled her most, when she sensed him lose that last remnant of acuity and conscientiousness to become just like every other lover in the final throes of ecstasy. When he proved to her what she had so long imagined: that beneath the buttoned-up suit tailored to him like armour and the intellect he wielded as both shield and sword there was a man capable of intense passion, and when he stripped himself of both, that passion burned. Each one of those instances—when their parted lips grazed together and they shared panted breaths, then reconnected in urgent, uncoordinated kisses, or he groaned low through an open mouth pressed next to her cheekbone, his eyes squeezed shut—was a victory and a validation, for both of them.
Because the journey to reach such a point had been long and often very painful, and the reward hard-earned. On each of their parts it had taken confusion at the most fundamental level, betrayal, multiple near-death experiences, and an unprecedented amount of personal courage to arrive at a point when thought, even the most prurient of calculations, could be overwhelmed by base intuition, and they could embrace all the inherent vulnerability that came with that. And so when she felt him fully lose himself with her, and she did the same with him, every challenge they had faced both together and apart was vindicated.
Pleasure balanced with pain, neither Irene nor Sherlock could or would have it any other way.