Ellie Goulding - Anything Could Happen
Sister Hazel - All For You
Gin Blossoms - Follow You Down
Ellie Goulding - Figure 8
Gin Blossoms - Til I hear It From you
He knows who it is that sent the flier. It is not Naoi. His wife is many things, petty, she is not. Professor Naoi Edric, guest lecture, two weeks from today. The time, the place, all conveniently at the bottom of the flier.
The envelope is quality paper stock. Cream color, eggshell texture. Not a single smudge on it. Ida Timoney at seventy seven is still quite the viper. From the creasing, it was Penny who placed the flier and the envelope. There is the smallest amount of black lint on the very tip of the paper.
Penny's suits must be getting old.
He calls Molly and Lestrade.
If Ida Timoney wanted an audience, he would give her an audience.
He's an addict, though his drug of choice is much different than most other people would choose. His drug is laughing blue-gray eyes and cinnamon freckles dusted over milky skin. The sound of soft breathing next to him in the morning. Copper strands of red hair draped across his pillows. His name called in the dark. Breasts that fill his hands with tight peaks he soothes with his tongue.
He could spend a lifetime figuring out what makes her make those sounds when he touches her.
Two fingers hooked in the damp crotch of her panties, pulling them down over her hips, thighs, knees and calves and feet. Pale blue painted toes. The sigh from her lips is his name as he slides his hands back up the insides of her legs. Thighs splayed for him, warm wet center open for his exploration.
Her body is fascinating.
She reaches for him, drawing him down. The scrape of blunt nails in his hair when they kiss. He could lose himself in kissing her.
One finger draws a high sharp breath from her. Her lips parted under his, his name a satisfied sound in his ears. A second finger, the way she presses her hips up, her fingers against the nape of his neck and the pitch of her moan deepening as he strokes.
The soft spongy spot behind her public bone is quite sensitive. It has her biting her lower lip, the muscles around his fingers clenching tight. A third finger and her back arched off the bed, pressing her breasts into his chest. He eases the hood of her clitorus back and strokes it steadily with the pad of his thumb.
She pulls him down desperately, stifling her cries with his mouth. He swallows every sound. It's past midnight. They can't risk waking her parents.
She strokes him through his jeans and boxers. He barely manages to hold back the groan that forms in his throat.
Her words are a barely breathed whisper. "Sherlock, condoms?"
He doesn't have them. He bought some, hid them in the downstairs lavatory in his house. He shakes his head in response and begins to thrust his fingers and rub and stroke making her gasp against his lips. A low litany of yes and his name fills the darkness around them.
He knows when her short nails dig into his shoulders. He knows when her legs start to kick against the bed. He covers her mouth with his as her walls clamp down on his fingers and convulse with her orgasm.
Blue gray eyes open in the dark as he sits back on his bed gently withdrawing his fingers from her body. She sighs a contented sound, sitting up for another kiss. Their tongues meet.
They are not dating.
They are also not not dating.
She takes his hand at the birthday barbecue in her parent's backyard. Her mother is a year older. He's tense, alarmed by her open display of intimacy when they've been keeping this, whatever this is out of their family's perview. He silently glances at his brother who has graced them all with his presence, and his parents.
Mycroft raises an eyebrow and nothing further.
She pointedly ignores this, touching his cheek, drawing his attention back to her. "Sherlock?"
Her mother squeals. Like a piglet. He is extremely disturbed by the sound. She sets down the tray (a tray!) of store bought generic margarita mix. "Good lord, are you two finally-"
He glowers.
Naoi giggles.
He tries to maintain his annoyance. She pushes up from her seat to kiss him. He's an addict. He gives in to her kiss, the stroke of her fingers in his hair. He can bear their fathers proudly shaking hands and their mothers squawking like birds for this.
For a kiss from his drug of choice.
She nuzzles his cheek, blocking out the world with her arm around his neck, her hand in his hair. "Don't worry about them. Look at me."
Blue eyes meet blue gray. Their foreheads touch. He wraps his arms around her.
They are not dating.
Their families believe otherwise.
He's out of hospital for the first time since the first overdose. Mycroft has extracted the deal from him. Leave a list. Then he hands Sherlock a small silver cellular phone.
"My number, mother and father's and her new phone number." Mycroft pats Sherlock's shoulder as he ventures downstairs to speak with their parents.
Her. Her. Her.
Sherlock flips the phone open and reads her new mobile number until it has its own space in his brain. He removes song lyrics to something his mother sang to him as a child to make the space. He doesn't call. He can't.
He thinks about her under him, blue gray eyes in the dark. The cry of his name from her lips as he entered her the first time. His restraint. It was all he could do not to lose himself in the moment.
She robs him of his senses. She knows how he thinks. She gets under his skin and into his head and there isn't a single drop of heroin or ounce of cocaine that can compare to the feel of her in his life.
The closest he comes to any of it is solving a crime. The satisfaction of it is a pale substitute for Naoi in his life.
He did the right thing. He knows that. He knows letting her aunt take her away was the right thing to do.
But Mycroft said, "Sherlock, if you knew that you would miss the girl so much, why didn't you marry her?"
His thumb strays to the green call symbol. Why didn't he?
She was doodling in her notebook in her tower at Pennyworth manor when the phone call came. Her mobile buzzed face down on the bed. Her brow furrowed. Her school friends text. Who would be-
At the unfamiliar number Naoi stabbed the red button declining the call. She set the phone back down, intent on ignoring it. A minute later it buzzed again. Voice mail.
Curiosity got the better of her. She called her voice mail, typing in her four digit pin.
"Naoi," Sherlock's voice makes her gasp, and tears prick her eyes. "I…I'm…," he breathed against the mic of the phone. The message ended.
She immediately rang him back. Once, twice, three then four. Naoi was about to resign herself to leaving him a message when the phone picks up and he breathes her name into thr receiver.
"Naoi."
She smiled despite her tears. "Sherlock." Naoi misses the way he would tilt his head, letting her thread through his curls. She loved his curls. She sniffed, curling up on her bed. "Hi."
"Hi." He replied though he sounds strange. Almost distant but tired at the same time.
"I miss you." She plucks at a loose string on the duvet. "Aunt Ida is a bore. Her man servant, can you believe she has an actual man servant, is awful." He says nothing. "Sherlock?"
He breathes out. "I…Naoi."
"Yes?" She has missed the way he said her name.
"Marry me."
Her heart goes wild in her chest. "Wh…what?" She expected to hear an equally lonely I miss you too in return. Or perhaps I miss your body. She wouldn't put it past him to be insensitive. She knew what she was doing when they started dating Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock had a blind spot when emotions came into play. He felt them, just not the same way she felt them. He was a sociopath, and possibly asexual. She was the only exception to his fences and shields and flagrant misbehavior.
"Sherlock, you said you never wanted to be married." Granted that was before they spent the entire summer courting. Before they made love. Before she was forced to leave him.
Absence did make one's heart grow fonder. But, Sherlock's heart? He didn't acknowledge he even had a heart most of the time.
She chewed her lower lip. "I…you want to marry me? You've probably dated so many girls since I left." She hated the very idea of another girl being touched the way he touched her.
He sounds as if he's shaking his head. "There is no one else. I don't need anyone else."
She breathes out hard. "Are you sure?" He's quiet, too quiet. "Sherlock?"
His breathing is even and slow.
Sleeping. He's sleeping.
Her eyes roll and the little bit of hope in her chest fades. He's not going to remember this when he wakes up.
She hangs up, but adds him to her contacts.
He wakes before she does. They're asleep on his bed, the DVD they watched last night still paused where they fell asleep last night. This is week three of their not dating.
He has an embarrassingly hard problem between his legs. Sherlock attempts to disengage himself from the octopus that Naoi becomes when she sleeps. She wakes the moment he moves, blinking sleepily at him.
"Good morning."
His breath is hard as one of her hands comes into contact with the hardest part of him.
"Most men would have made a move by now Sherlock." She strokes him slowly. His breathing is harder. "Do you not want me? Because I have always wanted you."
"I…"He loses his ability to think with her hand around him like that. "Naoi."
She withdraws. "I'm sorry. I thought-"
He leans down and kisses her. She smiles, kissing him back.
He doesn't make mistakes often. He thought, he assumed, when Naoi picked the university she was going to, that she picked it keeping them, him, in mind. She hasn't said a word about it since right before summer began.
Before they had started spending time together.
He wouldn't have known had he not overheard their mothers talking before they left for a shopping trip.
"They're so young. Sherlock has never had a girlfriend before." He froze outside the bathroom. Their mothers were supposed to have already left.
"Naoi has never been serious about any boy except Sherlock. Eight weeks and I haven't heard a single word about what he does to annoy her."
"He's never been this open with anyone." His mother agreed.
"He's different with her. Not so," her mother waved her hand about, "and she's always had a crush on him."
They laugh.
"I did tell you they would eventually become a couple." They're leaving. He wipes his still wet hands on his t-shirt.
Her mother sighs, "I just hope they're able to withstand her going away to university. It's an hour by train and-" the door closes.
There is a gnawing in his gut.
Naoi is still going away to uni.
He climbs the stairs to his room where Naoi has been waiting for him. Half naked and lying in what he would assume is a pose ment to get him excited. Another man would have forgotten what he overhead downstairs and joined her on the bed.
Sherlock is no one but himself.
She isn't like other people. Naoi knows there's something wrong immediately. She grabs his t-shirt off the corner of the bed where it landed almost twenty minutes ago. "What happened?" She asks as she pulls it over her head.
His brain is going with everything. Every single thing he knows about uni. About the kinds of people, the men she's going to meet there. About Naoi's tendency to go through men like people use tissues.
"You're leaving for uni in two weeks."
Her brow furrows. "Right. You knew that."
No. He didn't. He thought she was going to the local instead of the far away campus. Considering. This. Them. Whatever this was. They're not dating but they are doing something.
She's kneeling on his bed, looking confused and trying to understand why he's upset. "Sherlock?"
He wants to go back twenty minutes. Before he overhead their mothers. When he'd had his hand in her pants and she'd kissed him to muffle her sighs of pleasure. He'd fucked her with his fingers and she came hard, moaning his name into his mouth. She looked up at him with bedroom eyes and asked him if he would like to go get a condom.
He'd asked if she was sure.
She kissed him, gently nipping his lower lip. "Don't you want to?"
He had wanted to. That's why he went to get a condom from the downstairs bathroom where he'd hidden them. His mother tried to clean his room far too often to try to hide the small box there. But hiding it in the bathroom under the sink where the older, less used cleaning supplies were, easy enough.
He knows how boys her age act at uni. He remembers vividly the recounting of his peers on who and what they had done last night, or over the weekends. He remembers the laughter and the way they talked. He remembers hearing about boyfriends back home that will never know their girlfriend slept with someone else.
He really cannot bear the idea of someone touching her the way he touches her. So. He looks at her watching him with confusion.
And he picks a fight.
Because we all know this version of Sherlock is self destructive as fuck.