A/N: Sorry for the wait guys, life has gotten in the way. Next update hopefully soon, with a bit of news as well.
Hope this was worth the wait!
Warning: Adult Content; smut and language! Not for young eyes!
Part Five – Touch
Studying a hand is not the same as feeling one.
When you look closely upon a hand, regardless of its owner, it's like a world in its own right; the caverns created by breaks and lines in the skin, knuckle-high hills and wrinkled sand dunes connecting the branching phalanges, holding them together. Turning the palm over, there is a new land, a new expanse to explore and to exploit.
The lines where your fingers have bent to close in on themselves, to create fists, to simply hold tight to something, mark every separate appendage with lines of one or two or three. The palm is a story-book; it has the power to tell you your future or your past, your life or your death.
Sherlock had hidden away, in some dimly lit, dusty room in the West Wing of his Mind Palace, the instructions and information needed to read the palm. He decided to save that particularly unreliable deductive strategy for another day.
Instead, he pressed his lips to the space between John Watson's life line and his death line. It tasted like infinity there, and inside deep, inside the recesses of his once frosted-heart, Sherlock vowed to prolong the first as long as humanly possible, even if it take his own in the process. If there was ever someone to die for, it was this man.
John gave a low groan as the usually sharp tongue left the hidden cavern of that full-lipped mouth to play a pattern on the palm below it.
Wondering briefly whether any of the man's past lovers had given such scrutiny to these strong hands before, Sherlock shuddered at the thought his mouth was brushing, feeling, something that was unchartered. It humbled him, broke that terribly strong iron casing around his not-so-sociopathic heart as though it were made of twigs. Much like that home which the first 'little pig' had built to protect himself from a huffing wolf, Sherlock's defenses were blown down. Except the only place he had to go, ever had to go, was towards John.
Putting down the hand yet still holding firmly to it, Sherlock bent to sample the taste and feel of his doctor's face below his lips. John's eye-lashes tasted like the brush of a feather, his lids like jasmine crepe-paper. There were splotches of sugar and sunshine on the shorter man's cheeks, hidden springs of wine and wild-berries at the cleft in his chin, the line of his jaw. There was the lingering taste of mint and jam at the enclave between nose and lip. Sherlock gave in to a needy moan as the feeling, the touch of pure John filled his nerves when their lips finally collided.
Tongues battled for dominance, sucking and slicking and stretching to find every hidden bit of wonder inside the others mouth. Hands, in contrast, were reverently slow.
As if the bodies below them were brittle or fragile, likely to wither and crumble when pressured or punctured, fingers moved like feathers. It was slow, a tide coming in. John's left hand trembled but he knew it wasn't from something intermittent, it was the feeling of slowly lowering that zipper, it was kissing his way down that long body as the gasps and moans floated down into his ears to bang on the drums hidden inside there. It was the ignition of something hot, something that went straight to his already throbbing cock, when those finely built hips bucked forward, trying to find that mouth again. John gave in to this clawing need to take as he ran his tongue over Sherlock's hardness, still enclosed in fine white pants. He felt fingers in his hair, almost massaging his scalp. Taking a deep breath, sweat and skin and Sherlock permeating his lungs, those doctoral fingers pulled down the waist-band.
Sherlock felt everything.
It should have been terribly overwhelming, uncomfortable, even frightening but it wasn't, not anything close; it was a cascade of a never-ending everything, swirling and churning around him, in him, on him. In no way was it unpleasant, this hyper-awareness of his own body as opposed to the usual scrutiny and attention he paid his surroundings. He could feel all the touches of Johns tongue on his hip, on his pelvis, on the small expanse of skin which dwelled between naval and pubic bone.
No, in no way was this unpleasant.
Then there was the tentative warmth of a tongue on the head of his cock and Sherlock gasps, his hips bucking involuntarily as they demanded more of that electricity, the one which lit multi-coloured Christmas lights inside the genius' mind. Feeling a teasing tongue roll its tip over the slit, Sherlock moaned and his fingers sought purchase in that short ashen hair. Suddenly there was a flattened wetness and heat trailing a long streak up the length of his throbbing member and with that Sherlock closed his eyes tightly and omitted a trembling, "fuck."
Juxtaposing the long, torturous licks which now became rhythmic on his near-painful hardness was the circling of John Watson's thumbs on the inner-side of his thighs. It was as if John was trying to leave some sort of coded message on his skin, some sort of calligraphy formed in finger-print shapes and the crescent-shaped accents of nails. As his clever soldier engulfed the head of his cock, the detective's head swam in a river, or an ocean, or perhaps it was just John he swam in now; he felt completely engulfed by the man, ruled by sensation. It was as liberating as it was dominating.
Truly it was trivial where his mind had gone as long as his body was here to feel; as if there were any kind of choice. As Sherlock felt the telltale broiling of release race through his body like a firestorm he gave a quick tug to that short ashen-hair, his head leaned back with eyes languidly closed. He felt the mouth around his lazily remove itself with an almost comical "pop" sound, then there was the light touch of fingernails tracing his cheekbones. Moving into the touch, he wondered how long it could take to remove the remaining garments which adorned his extraordinarily fascinating doctor.
John was too busy, too focused and engrossed in the education of himself in Sherlock's body to even think of his own needs. Later this would become a revelation; sure, in the past he was a slow lover, taking pleasure in the pleasure of his partner. But now, with Sherlock, it was as though they had undergone some kind of role reversal, or he had unintentionally absorbed some bit of that analytically driven detective though deep kisses and the exchange of breath. Now, he certainly wanted to be slow and tender but he also wanted to explore every single enclave, every dip of muscle and bone, ever dot of freckle or birthmark. He was the worst kind of pioneer, one which would happily get lost and live in the undiscovered territory for weeks, months, years, with no thought to anything but the sheer pleasure of the landscape.
John was lost in Sherlock.
His fingers traveled over that alabaster skin they traced the shadows thrown from those slashing cheekbones, the pale pink lips still wet from Sherlock's own tongue, the dark eyebrows and ever-youthful forehead. Using the delicacy of a doctor, he ran fingertips over still-closed eyelids and traced the almond shape of them. Almost as though he had been woken slowly from an incredibly good dream, Sherlock's eyes opened languidly. The two men's gaze locked on and held, each dictating without words their own separate battles of emotions and sentiment, want and admiration. John leaned in slowly till only the space of a hair remained between them. Eyes holding that connection, he waited for Sherlock to give some sort of recognition to this gesture: 'this is it,' he tried to say with his eyes. 'Yes or no?'
As if he heard it all, Sherlock gave a brief roll of his eyes in mock exasperation before colliding their lips together in a hungry kiss of tongue and teeth and hard demand.
Whether they walked or ran or even floated Sherlock didn't know; they fell into his bed and as John licked his palm. Sherlock didn't care how they had gotten here, as long as he never left this place below his lover, feeling that wet palm wrap around him, stroking from base to head. John's teeth were on that leanly muscled shoulder, making a routine, a physical mantra out of bite, suck, lick.
With labored breath and sugar-scented sweat invading his nostrils, Sherlock batted the hand on his cock away only to replace it with his long fingered one, simultaneously taking John's prick in his hand as well. Precome a natural lubricant, the doctor and the detective moaned in tandem. Licking the edge of Sherlock's ear and nipping at the lobe as those dexterous fingers rubbed a thumb over the slit of his throbbing hardness, John's hips thrust into the fisted tightness. There was a tingling over his body, a desperate need which almost stung him. As his brunette counterpart stroked harder and faster, they were reduced to gasping sighs and fervent moans of "God, please, yes."
John felt Sherlock begin to shake, felt that well-muscled back arch beneath him; the fire in those ice eyes as John watched the great genius come undone was enough to push him over the edge. Taking hold over the hand between them as it trembled, he buried his face in that long pale neck; repeating the only words that mattered, the ones that touched along every inch of that long body, writing itself in firing nerve-cells and burning into bone marrow.
"I love you, love you so much."
And when Sherlock breathe again, it was the scent of him. It was that man with the ocean-eyes he saw smiling restfully beside him, it was the touch of those tanned hands on his cheek he fell asleep to.
It was always John.