Chapter Eight: The Third Issue
John didn't hang around much after finishing his coffee. And Sherlock never came home for the evening. He didn't answer when I texted him about dinner so I ordered myself something.
After I ate dinner, I packed for the week, as I was going to go on the assumption of a weeklong trip regardless of the constant threat of a month.
As I sat at the piano bench staring at my still foreign home, I wished I still had my bike. I decided that after we came back from California I would launch a campaign to try and figure out where Sherlock had hidden it.
I opened the piano and started playing, idly at first, then scales, then I transitioned to Chopin's Nocturn Op.9 No 2.
As I began to play I heard a noise in the foyer. A voice. Two voices. Both male.
I didn't stop playing because I didn't want whoever was in the foyer to know I had heard them.
I heard Sherlock's flat door open and finally the voices were close enough that I could recognize one, especially as I rounded minute two in the piece I was playing and the notes became more spaced out.
Sherlock. Sherlock and a man downstairs. Loud. Laughing.
I listened and played. Couldn't make out what they were saying, but they sounded rambunctious. Possibly drunk.
As my piece finished I heard and felt a bang at my feet. I lifted my hands off the keys.
"WHAT?" I bellowed at the floor.
"Play something romantic!" Sherlock bellowed back, immediately followed by raucous laughter.
"Fuck off!" I yelled and started playing Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 8 in A minor.
The noise downstairs quieted for a couple minutes before I heard the tones change.
It started with a couple low, spaced out moans.
Some yelling.
Some cursing. I could make out those words, at least.
Demanding tones from Sherlock.
A cry out.
They were sex noises. I knew they were. And I knew Sherlock was doing it all on the couch. The couch I would need to sanitize tomorrow.
He had gotten my attention- made sure I had heard him by banging on the ceiling. Made sure I knew he was having fun with someone. And then decided to have the loudest sex possible, nearly directly under me.
Oh my god, it was directly under me. It wasn't the couch. It was the desk.
I moved on to Sonata No. 13. I would play Mozart sonatas until the loud fucking ceased.
Honestly, it would have been hot if it hadn't been so obviously faked. Or at least…dramatized. Not by the other man, he seemed to be legitimately enjoying himself. But Sherlock was making a ridiculous amount of contrived noise. Maybe that's what he sounded like in the throes. But I rather thought not.
Eventually all got quiet for a couple minutes and I considered ceasing my playing until I heard Sherlock's flat door slam. Fast footsteps. Too fast to be Sherlock; his stride was longer than that.
As I listened my playing strayed into something I had playing in the back of my mind. I didn't hear anything else from downstairs. I braced for a thump on the floor. Nothing. Maybe Sherlock left. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe murdered.
I found myself playing "Happiness is a butterfly" by Lana Del Rey, which had just come out. I must have committed it to memory without noticing.
As I sang, I vacillated between hoping my voice wouldn't carry downstairs, and also wondering if Sherlock was even downstairs or if he was okay.
Despite our weird game playing we were doing, I found his reputation and his intense intellect compelling and the devotion of his family and friends intriguing. Unless I had misread John direly, he was an assuredly decent man who obviously loved Sherlock with the devotion of a brother. Hell, even his adorable daughter loved him. Little kids are great judges of character.
So, if Sherlock could be a decent person to people he actually knew and cared about, then his treatment was more indicative of the regard he had for our relationship than it was the kind of person he was.
Although one could say his ability to treat other people as experiments could be a major comment on his character.
If I was going to keep working for Sherlock, I needed to stop engaging in these conversations and activities that violated boundaries, otherwise I would devolve into one of his discarded experiments. Like the man who had left a few minutes prior. There was no chance that Sherlock was thinking about him at all or that he would ever again.
Which, I thought to myself, certainly lent credence to my theory that Sherlock would actually enjoy sexual activity with someone he cared about.
I centered myself while I sang.
This was the deal. This was my experience of life. I move through people's lives, playing helpful parts, and then they transition away from me. Leave, run.
Die.
Maybe after my dissertation defense I would get some sort of fellowship that paid money and I could leave this job and very strange chapter of my life in the past. It was all such a bigger, more complicated story that I clearly didn't fit into.
I was a help, a distraction, a tool.
We're used to this, I told myself. We'll move through and move on.
It was going to be nice to get back to California.
If I could put my hands into the Pacific again, maybe things could make some semblance of sense.
I was up at five the next morning. I put a flannel shirt and big fuzzy boots on over my pajamas and snuck downstairs, grabbing a cup of coffee from a shop around the corner. It was the first week of September and surprisingly chilly that morning, or at least it felt so to my previously sun-soaked bones.
In my ears I was listening, for the five millionth time, to Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division. I had listened to it on repeat ten times in a row that morning. Honestly, I didn't care how silly it was- I needed to stay sane.
And sober. This was my coping mechanism.
I was actively not thinking about my father, and my coming absence that Sunday, and the possible fallout from that.
Sherlock had told me not to feel beholden to my father. I had felt in the moment he had made an empathetic point, and it had been nice to hear someone tell me I wasn't responsible for my dad or his life or choices. But looking back on it now, as I opened the door to 221B, I realized it was probably just the button Sherlock was pushing on me to get me to accompany him to California.
Back in my flat, I changed the output on my phone audio from my earbuds to my Bluetooth speaker, sitting on the piano bench, leaning back against the piano, my bare feet on the windowsill, drinking my coffee and staring at the wispy clouds in the blue morning sky. Of course it was sunny the day I was leaving.
I had to admit I was excited to get back to the States. Nervous, maybe. Especially California being the root of my heroin habit.
Maybe I would ditch Sherlock at LAX, go back to one of the smackhouses I knew of, and just…die to death.
I had spent years getting and staying sober. I had just told John I wasn't interested in getting high again, only yesterday.
And yet…the bright blue sky.
It reminded me of being in one of the LA area city parks, high as tits, lying in the grass, surrounded by blue skies. The sunlight ringing in my eyes like visual tinnitus. Knowing I was dying and not caring. Nothing in my mind, no fear, no shame. No words. No puzzles. No predators. The eternal and tenuous state of my temporary and never-ending existence.
In the middle of my musings, I was startled nearly into dropping my now empty coffee cup by my door slamming open.
"We are going to be late!" Sherlock yelled. He had flung the door wide open, wearing what appeared to be the vestiges of last night's outfit, dark wash denim jeans, white button up shirt buttoned twice and not in order. His dark, gray-streaked hair, which seemed to be growing very quickly, was mussed and part of it had fallen over the right side of his forehead, hiding the receding hairline.
"We aren't." I said wearily, standing up and throwing my empty cup into a trash can. Suddenly a wrist with a large, expensive watch was thrust under my nose.
Sherlock reeked of booze and cigarettes and an unfamiliar, overpowering cologne. I sighed and grabbed his arm to steady it enough to read the time.
"Sherlock, this watch is wrong. By an hour and a half." I dropped his arm and looked up at him. He seemed to be sobering the longer he stood in my flat.
"Oh." He deflated.
"Why don't you go take a shower." I suggested, avoiding his eyeline. "Do you need help packing?"
"I can pack my own luggage." He sneered at me, suddenly noticing his button situation and beginning to rebutton.
"I know you can, but have you?"
"Mostly." He sniffed.
"Go get in the shower and I'll get dressed and head down there and help you finish packing before we leave. We do need to leave in an hour or we will, in fact, be late."
He eyed me suspiciously. "You're acting…strange."
"Mm, no, Sherlock, you won't be commenting on odd behavior today." I grabbed his shoulders and turned him toward my front door, pressing him toward it. "Shower please."
He growled with discontent but complied, slamming my door as he left. I shook my head. This flight was going to be…torturous.
I finished dressing in my comfortable-for-flying black velour tracksuit and grabbed all of my luggage, hauling it down to Sherlock's flat and setting it by the door.
I walked in and observed all of the papers that had been all over the desk, which I had painstakingly organized into folders and files, were now on the ground.
It smelled like…I wasn't even sure. Blood, semen, desperation, despair? Just a nightclub, in general, I supposed.
A fresh, moist air came from down the hallway and I could hear Sherlock still in the shower. I walked into his room and took in the packing situation.
His idea of 'mostly' packed was everything he wanted to take being set onto his bed for me to stuff into luggage for him. I sighed. I couldn't believe that twenty-four hours prior I was balls deep in some sort of sexually charged chess game with this man child.
As I zipped up a hanging suit case, the bathroom door popped open and a great cloud of steam containing a stark naked Sherlock emerged.
"Towel?" I asked, eyeing him up and down. I should have known from the length of his fingers that…well, I shouldn't have been surprised about any of the situation, size-wise.
"Already used it." He sniffed, walking over to the bed I was packing and making a mess of one of the piles to grab his clothes for the flight. I sighed again.
"You sure are breathing heavily a lot this morning." Sherlock complained. "Rough night?" He took his time slipping on boxer briefs, hefting his package in what I felt was an exceptionally obvious and obscene manner. He smirked at me, no light in his eyes.
"I slept like a baby." I smiled at him. "Thanks for asking."
He was only put off for a moment. "I disproved your theory last night, by the way."
"Can't wait to hear this one." I mumbled, zipping up another case and pulling it heavily into the hallway toward the door into the foyer. Sherlock followed me but did not assist.
"I exercised my need for dominance." He sniffed again, pulling a too-tight, plum colored shirt around his frame, buttoning the black buttons deftly with long fingers. "It was just as underwhelming as it always is."
"Oh, Sherlock." I muttered under my breath, throwing the bags down and heading back into his room for the last carry on.
"What? What am I missing?" He said, his energy much too frantic for six in the morning. "You were wrong."
"That was only part of my theory." I unrolled and rerolled a couple pairs of socks that had been mismatched. "Anyway, no. We're not talking about this anymore." I looked up at him and he looked triumphant at first, like my refusal to talk was an admission that he had won. But his facial expression faltered.
"Fine." He said shortly, although it seemed far from fine. "Why don't you make us breakfast." He ordered under the guise of a request.
"Sure thing." I said, finishing the carry on and handing it to him, heading into the kitchen to make frittata.
As I cooked, Sherlock sat at the kitchen table, watching me move around the cramped cooking area. His fingers were steepled in front of his face.
"You're upset with me." He said, a glimmer of hope in his voice.
"No." I countered, flatly.
"I don't understand. You're so cold this morning. I mean, I thought the loud sex would bother you, but I didn't know it would bother you this much."
I flipped the frittata in the pan. "That is not what's…I'm not upset." I turned around to face him as he continued to stare at me in a critical manner. "We need to just stick to professional topics, okay? If this is going to work out, me continuing to be, well, your personal assistant apparently, we need to keep it professional."
"No, that's not what this is about." He said quietly. "You are upset, but it's about something else entirely. A Third Issue."
I looked at him nervously, the flat silent suddenly.
"It is." He reiterated, getting up from the table and coming around closer to me without breaking eye contact. He stood a couple feet from me.
"Well, enlighten me. Please." He ordered.
"You wouldn't understand." I said finally, turning back to my cooking and plating our breakfasts. I cast a glance at the clock. We would need to eat quickly.
I shoved a plate at Sherlock and he took it and we both sat down at the kitchen table.
"I'm not sure what about me gives you the idea that there's anything I would fail to understand." He said conceitedly.
"It's outside of your scope of experience. It's less about understanding and more about…empathy." I took a bite.
He took a bite also. "I guess I can't fault you for assuming a lack of empathy on my part." He mumbled with his mouth full.
I nodded once in acknowledgment of his concession and assumed that would be the end of the conversation.
We ate silently and as I cleaned up the plates, quickly washing the dishes I had used before we needed to leave, he suddenly came to stand behind me as I scrubbed the stainless steel pan.
"So try me." He said, continuing the conversation I thought we had ceased almost ten minutes prior.
"Sherlock. Why?" I asked, drying the pan quickly and putting it in the dish drainer.
"Maybe I'm more capable of empathy than you think."
I pushed past him and did another once over of the flat. "I think we have everything. We should head out."
"I have a car coming. It should be here soon."
Sherlock helped me take the bags downstairs and the hired car pulled up just in time. The driver got out and helped us load the luggage. Sherlock opened the door for me and I got in. He closed it, more gently than usual, and a moment later he was sitting beside me as we embarked for the airport.
"Can I have my ticket?" I asked him after a little while. He had been staring straight ahead for an extended period of time when I realized that I had my passport in my purse but not my boarding pass or ticket.
"Hm? Oh, there's no need. We have a private plane. We'll board from the tarmac."
I felt a childish little thrill at that. I had never been so much as business class on a plane before and now- a private plane? As much as Sherlock chose to live in a poverty-like filth state, I forgot that he had, at this disposal should he wish to use it, a lot of money. More than I had ever had, that was certain.
I looked over at Sherlock to see if he would take the piss out of me for being so excited, but he was distractedly looking out of the window. He hadn't bothered to shave that morning. It reminded me of when I had first met him. That seemed like months ago at this point but it had only been two weeks. Unbelievable. Two weeks and my life no longer seemed like my own. That seemed to be the lot when it came to being in Sherlock Holmes' orbit. I thought back to John's blog.
Sherlock moved fast, absorbed you, applied you in the manner in which he needed you. Your old life was gone.
You were in Sherlock Holmes' story now.
I looked him over for a long enough time that I was surprised he didn't notice. Didn't call me out. Didn't engage me at all. Like he was distracted.
Like he was coming down.
I dug around my small black crossbody purse and pulled out my phone, ensuring it was angled so that it couldn't be seen by Sherlock or in the reflection of my window, although Sherlock was paying zero attention to me anyway.
I texted John:
DP: Hey, weird question- do you have Mycroft Holmes' phone number?
After a moment I got two texts in rapid succession. My phone was on silent with no vibration so there was no danger of Sherlock hearing it.
One text was from John:
JW: I do. Is everything alright?
The other was from an unknown number.
"Delilah Patrick. I already have your number. How can I help you? -MH"
I sighed. Government. Of course he's monitoring my phone. Hope he enjoyed the porn I was watching the other night.
I texted John:
DP: All is well. Thanks.
JW: Enjoy California!
I looked at Mycroft's text. I saved his contact in my phone as "Marjorie".
I wasn't sure what to say to him. After a long moment, I didn't have to decide because Mycroft texted me again.
MH: Is he using? -MH
The Holmes boys and their deductions.
MH: Not that I am aware of.
I finally wrote back, hoping he could read between the lines.
MH: Keep in touch. -MH
I backed out of my messages, looking at the list of messages, "Marjorie" at top, John next. I was considering answering him back one more time.
"Who's Marjorie?"
Sherlock was leaning over looking toward the phone suddenly. I had forgotten I was trying to hide the phone from him.
"Research fellow at UCLA had a question about one of the papers I co-authored." I lied easily.
"You're still messaging with John."
"Yes, he's my friend."
"Hm." Sherlock looked back out the window, his posture more bent than usual.
We were pulling into the airport but driving into an area separate from the main parking lot. There was a line of hangars and a little way away from them a small private jet sat on a runway away from the jumbo jets further down the way.
My heart started fluttering. I was not an experienced flyer and for some reason the thought of going on a smaller plane was more nerve wracking than the larger ones. I drummed my fingers on my thigh and bounced my other leg.
"Are you alright?" Sherlock asked as we parked near one of the hangars. He was looking over at me with a look that bordered on concern but settled mostly on curious.
"Small planes apparently frighten me." I admitted. To my utter shock, Sherlock reached his hand over and placed it on my hand. I wasn't sure if it was meant to be comforting or to get me to stop tapping my fingers. He squeezed my hand gently and got out of the SUV as the driver unloaded out bags onto a trolley. He came around and opened the door for me and I dropped out of the tall vehicle onto the ground, following behind him and feeling like a child as I followed his lead up the steps of the small plane.
The interior reminded me of the Mercedes, everything well lit and in cream leather. There was a table with two chairs, two couches, and a couple belted seats.
A flight attendant directed me to a chair and gave me an overview of what to expect and how to evacuate the plane, etcetera. After we had settled she disappeared into a front part of the plane, telling us to push a button if we needed anything.
I looked at a screen with a graphic of the plane and our trajectory. It was 7 am- our arrival time was 8pm London time, which would have been noon in LA, meaning we were going back in time in the simplest and most inaccurate sense that I still got a bit of a kick out of.
We began to take off and, as the noise in the cabin got louder and the seats started to vibrate, I closed my eyes and gripped the arms of my chair.
I tried to control my breathing as I squeezed my eyes shut.
Finally the noise level and vibration dropped off a little and I heard a soft chime. We were now free to move about the cabin, as they say.
I threw off my seatbelt and stumbled onto one of the couches, lying on my back with my knees bent and my arms over my face, practicing breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth.
"Jesus, I didn't know you'd bethatafraid."
I uncovered my face and opened my eyes, looking up at Sherlock.
"I didn't either." He looked really nice in that shirt. I opened my mouth to say so, and then remembered that I had made a deal with myself to be strictly professional with him.
As if reading those thoughts, Sherlock grabbed my knees and lifted my lower legs and feet off of the couch, sitting down and putting my legs over his lap. He took my right leg in his hand and pulled off one of my fuzzy boots and threw it aside.
"What on earth are you doing?" I sighed.
"These boots are hideous. It's September. And they're just…fucking ugly." He took the other one and pitched it aside also, leaving me in mismatched socks. Sherlock shook his head.
"So, the Third Issue."
I groaned and went to swing my legs off of him and launch myself off of the couch but he yanked me back into place harshly.
"Stop running from me." He hissed, glaring at me. I glared back at him and his gaze held mine, he glared harder, and just a moment prior I wouldn't have said that was possible. "I also don't like this lack of engagement. All morning you have been doing nothing but sighing loudly and evading my attempts at conversation, like you're a bored schoolteacher."
"Interesting choice of imagery there." I commented, trying to stifle a smirk.
"There'sthe Delilah I am used to."
My ass was already pressed against his thigh and he pivoted deftly, throwing my left leg around his waist and shoving my right into the backrest of the couch, positioning himself over me, his hands planted on either side of my head.
I sighed deeply. "Sherlock, what are you-"
He grabbed my jaw with a strong right hand, pulling my face upward, much like he had in the car the week prior.
"Stop sighing at me like that." He growled through gritted teeth. He looked so angry in that moment. Rage truly contorted his face in unexpected ways.
"Sherlock, are you okay?" I asked, though my mouth was squished by the way he was grabbing my face.
He released my face but stayed positioned over me. I could tell he was trying to keep his face neutral but boy, was he failing. I wasn't really sure what emotion he was trying to hide, so at least he had succeeded in concealing his true feelings.
"I'm always okay." He huffed.
"That is…very provably untrue." I countered, but there was more kindness than snark in my tone.
Although positioned right over my head, his pelvis pinning mine to the couch, he was at that point very much not in the same universe as I was. He was looking at me but not. I could tell something complicated was going on inside of his mind. I watched his face, the micro expressions that passed over his countenance as he traversed whatever journey he was on.
I took that moment also to look over his physicality, try and see if there were any tells or signs that he had been using any sort of drug again. His pupils were of an appropriate dilation for the lighting, his sclera clear, his skin looked well hydrated and a moment ago when he had bared his teeth at me his gums were an appropriate color. He was not clammy.
None of this meant too much if he had just started again but it was not useless data either.
I ran my hands over his forearms and up to his biceps, my thumbs applying pressure on his inner arm as I did. As I reached the pits of his elbows and squeezed lightly, that seemed to bring Sherlock back from wherever he had been. I saw the flicker of his heartbeat in his neck quicken.
"What are you doing?"
I removed my hands from him, holding them up near my shoulders in surrender. He finally got up off of me, sitting back on his heels.
"You think I'm on drugs."
I pulled myself up, sitting facing him.
"You are acting a little erratic." I admitted.
He began unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt. "Did my brother put you up to this? Told you to keep an eye on me? He paying you?"
He rolled his sleeves up and showed me his pale and unmarred inner arms.
I grabbed his right arm, running my hand over the soft skin, although I could tell there was nothing there. "He had nothing to do with my concern." I looked up at him, grabbing his other arm and doing the same, my fingers pushing into the bend of his arm. "You know this means nothing, right, you could still be using something else, or injecting it somewhere else. You seemed a little coked up last night, to be honest."
He gave me an exasperated look and wrenched his arm away from me. "Don't be ridiculous." I snorted, although he seemed…embarrassed.
I sat there and looked at him as his own hand trailed where mine had been, gently rubbing the crook of his arm where my fingers had pressed in.
As we sat in silence I noticed there was something very loudly unspoken between us. I didn't think it was simply on my end, although there were a number of things I was withholding from him at that point.
Instead, the secrecy seemed to come from his end, although was that really a turnabout?
Sherlock finally shifted off of his heels and then got up off of the couch and went to sit at one of the chairs at the table. I took my earbuds out of my tracksuit jacket pocket and was about to slip them into my ears when Sherlock made an "eh, eh!" noise and I looked up at him.
"What?" I asked, specifically not sighing at him.
"Please. Delilah. Just tell me what is bothering you, why you are refusing to continue our relationship as it had been. Is it because of last night? I was…I admit I was trying to evoke a reaction from you as well as test my own theories, but one of my projected outcomes was not you becoming completely disinterested."
I think for a moment, trying to dissect his comments into pieces I could address one at a time. I decided to wait on challenging his statement that we had a 'relationship'.
"How was that not one of your projected outcomes?"
"You're typically so emotionally charged, not to mention sexually. I thought at worst you would become…jealous."
"Okay, on that note, I will ask you- what do you think our relationshipis?"
"Obviously we don't have a romantic relationship." He rolled his eyes. "I did think we had a bit of a sexual one."
I open my mouth but close it again. Thinking back, I couldn't say our relationship wasnotsexual, although we had not had sex, or even kissed, we had been in sexualized positions and had sexually explicit conversations.
"I hadn't thought about it that way." I admitted.
"Let me askyou." He moved from the chair to the couch across from mine, sitting on his leg and throwing his arms widely across the back. "How do you define our relationship? Or what it had been before you decided to become so…boring about it?"
I glared at him. "I felt like we were becoming friends, for a moment, and then I realized that, most likely I was…I was just another experiment."
"All of my friends are experiments. And I experiment on all of my friends."
I crossed my legs under myself. "Right, but I started to think maybe I was more like the man last night, than I ever would be like, say…John."
As I said these things, I realized that although I had felt very mature in making the decision to back away from our sexualized chess match, that it was less about wanting to have a mature, appropriate relationship with my boss, and more about my deep insecurities and intrinsic abandonment issues. I blushed and looked down at my mismatched socks, embarrassed.
I looked up at Sherlock, hoping he wouldn't call me out on my childish vulnerability.
He was watching me process things, my face exposing my feelings in the manner of blood seeping from a wound.
As he looked like he was about to say something, I decided to beat him to it.
"You have to understand, Sherlock. I am entirely alone. I know you have experienced loneliness and isolation in your life.I know they say there's nothing lonelier than feeling alone whilst surrounded by people. But I don't think that's true. I think complete isolation is worse.
'Even before you had John, who is a truer love and friend than I have ever imagined anyone having- you had your brother. Your parents. You have people in your corner. You are exceptional and are recognized as such. I'm nobody. And I have no one. So, although it is tempting to immerse myself in your world, and to feel like your friend or whatever, and to feel like I belong somewhere, the bonds that I see you engage with- and sometimes take for granted- just…magnify how I don't have those bonds. And if I let you make me believe I do, for the sake of my utility to you as an assistant or as an experiment, and then my usefulness comes to an end, and I am once again separated from everything I have become attached to and familiar with- I don't know if I can survive that happening to me again."
I said it all very quickly, looking everywhere around the fancy plane except anywhere at him.
Sherlock shifted forward, putting both his feet on the ground. "Christ, Delilah. I don't even know what to say to that. That's a lot of assumption and pressure to put on a situation. You have really written me as a villain in that."
"I don't mean to. It's not a comment on you, rather a comment on myself. I have proven to be disposal and replaceable. Repeatedly. I'm not an object of permanence. When people don't see me they forget about me."
"That's not true. What about your papers?"
"A product. Nobody cares about me, just the work."
He looked over my face slowly as my eyes welled with tears, moving away from his gaze to fixate on the couch cushion beside him.
"You're really feeling sorry for yourself, aren't you?" He ribbed, unexpectedly.
I snorted. "Yeah, apparently a little." I admitted.
"You should stop listening to your sobby music all the time. That might help."
I shot him a look but then a small smile broke. "Honestly it might."
Sherlock smiled back at me.
"Honestly, Delilah, despite the fact that the Sherlock Holmes in your imagination is a heartless and cruel bastard, I have to tell you that, although about ten years ago I would have agreed with you, it seems like I am not quite that calculating and careless. I wouldn't engage with you as anything beyond an assistant, or a night-long distraction, if I didn't mean for you to take it that way. I'm not a person to lead someone on for their usefulness alone. And I know that for a fact, because I did do that, once. It was a calculation, I felt she wouldn't take it to heart. She didn't. But it still felt so entirely callous that I promised I would never do anything like that again. But don't tell John, because I've never copped to it before."
I gasped in a friendly mocking manner. "Did you just confess to feeling guilty about something?" I whispered.
"Shut up." He look upward and glared at me over the bridge of his nose, but a small smile played on his lips. "You know, if you're feeling insecure, you can just say something outright. Just ask me."
I tilted my head. "You hardly ever give me a straight answer on anything."
"That is not true. You never ask straightforward questions. It's like you've already played every conversation ahead in your mind. It's usually very easy for me to talk to you because a lot of context can be assumed and skipped over when we converse, I appreciate that, but sometimes it leads you to plug in entire sentences and exchanges that never even happened and you engage the person based on what you've already assumed they're going to say."
"I'm not often wrong about what people are going to say." I pointed out.
"Well, no. Not with most people anyway. I propose to you these two things: Firstly, that perhaps it's not fair to assume a person is going to say the absolute worst most terrible thing to you. Secondly, that you might give at least me a chance to surprise you? I feel that if anyone could, it would be me."
I pulled my right leg over my lap, stretching my hip as I considered what he had said. "I suppose it isn't really fair, is it? To assume the worst about people. I assume it because I feel like I'm so terrible I'll bring out the worst in people."
"You're doing it again." Sherlock said shortly.
"Doing what?"
"Feeling sorry for yourself!" He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "You had a bad hand dealt in a lot of ways. But look at your gifts. Your intellect, your beauty, the fact that you died and they managed to bring you back. And you're going to squander them on self pity?"
I squished down my first instinct to question him about my 'beauty'. That would be shallow, especially since he had mentioned in the same breath my overdose. Besides, I objectively adhered to Western beauty standards and I couldn't argue that I had, in my younger drug addled days, used that fact to my advantage.
"If I'm so great, why am I alone?" I countered.
"You're not alone. Granted, you were for a long time, but you're not now. And you just have to have faith that you won't be in the future. If you assume the worst is going to happen then, with equal lack of evidence, why not assume the best? Again, never tell anyone I said something that pitifully optimistic." He huffed, leaning back against the couch once more.