Chapter 14

Jack’s murder has set back Julian and Charles’ investigation into Lu’s disappearance. Even though the two events don’t appear to be linked, the murder has made Schenley temporarily inaccessible, except for the vigil the night before. Piper says that by the end of the week, things should be back to normal enough for them to come and ask more questions, if that’s what they want. So the detective and his assistant remain in a holding pattern at the moment, Julian devoting his attention to other cases, and Charles devoting his attention to daily housekeeping and archiving. And to thinking about Julian.

A disappearance, and a murder, and a kiss. The convergence of those three things shouldn’t make Charles’ stomach churn with something suspiciously like excitement. Someone is missing. Someone else is dead. And as for the kiss…

As for the kiss. Well.

Charles can’t shake the feeling that he’s done something wrong. More specifically, that he’s done something wrong to Julian. In his apartment on Wednesday night he sits on top of his secondhand kitchen table and finally lets himself, after a long day of suppressing it, dip his toe once more into the memory of the kiss. Julian’s breath as they found themselves nose-to-nose. The press of Julian’s mouth on Charles’.

His mind shies away from it, stopping him from reliving the sensation. Julian’s face blooms in his head instead, his face when he is in the company of other people: reserved, cautious. Guarded.

Charles feels jittery with anxious energy, with the sense of having misled Julian, with the need to clarify, to explain, to sort things out. To say…what, exactly? I’ve never…and I don’t know if…

If what?

I’m not historically known to be attracted to…

For fuck’s sake.

“Julian,” Charles says aloud. “So, I just—I wanted to say that I—”

He buries his face in his hands.

“I don’t know what I think I’m misleading you about,” he says, voice muffled. “I just…feel like I am.”

He can’t say that to Julian. Julian is his employer, for one thing. Julian is his childhood obsession, for another. Julian is his link to Lu and Piper and Schenley and a real, true, actual mystery.

And Julian is so quiet.

Charles doesn’t really know him at all.

With a frustrated kick at the table leg, Charles hops to the floor. He throws himself onto his bed, stomach-down, and kicks off his shoes as his feet dangle over the side. He wrestles in his pocket with his phone. Before he can stop himself, he pulls up Archive of Our Own, and Lu’s profile.

With a sort of punishing reckless determination, Charles scrolls through her fics and chooses the first sexually graphic one he can find. It’s rated E for explicit, and its tags include “rimming,” “dom/sub undertones,” and “facial.” (It’s also tagged with “character study,” “a lot of feelings,” and “queer interiority,” though these are less relevant to Charles’ choice in this moment.) He clicks it open and vows to read it through to the end.

If you know anything at all about Sherlock Holmes, it is that he eschews all emotion.

Watson has made sure of that. Readers of his tales have a clear image of a man more like a machine: cold, calculating, brilliant, blank. He has assigned me the occasional romantic quirk; one might suppose that when I play the violin, for instance, some buried thread of feeling glints like precious metal in a smooth chunk of slate. I have room in my heart for music, then, for beauty—but not for other people.

It makes my job easier, he explains to his readers. Emotional distance helps me see things clearly.

What he should say, would say, if he were telling the truth, is that propagating the illusion of emotional distance makes it easier for both of us to live our lives free of scrutiny. I am not in fact a heartless automaton. I simply reserve my deep feeling, my great passion, for an object the world does not allow. I am in love with John Watson—to the point of possessiveness, irrationality, self-abnegation—and were his readers to perceive that, and to deduce as well that he loves me in return, we would face scandal and trial and the end of both our lives as free Englishmen.

Watson is very clever for painting me in this light, then. He is cleverer, in fact, than the Sherlock Holmes of fiction ever acknowledges. Yet he did not come up with this image of the heartless Holmes from whole cloth. There is a grain of truth in it. Before I knew him—or rather, before I admitted I loved him—I was that unyielding rock face, that mechanical man. And Watson was the one who opened me up and took me apart to reveal to both of us the raw currents of need and desire flowing deep within my veins.

**

We had been living together some six months when it happened. Watson had proved quite a valuable aid during several of my cases, and we took our morning tea together when I bothered to eat, which was more in the way of consistent companionship than I had experienced in my adult life. He also served as excellent practice for my deducting capacities; I was forever ferreting out information about his former life and his daily movements from the marks on his shoes and the creases in his brow. The trick amused and entertained him. I was a little vain about this, I admit. Wanting to impress Watson ought to have been my first clue that something was not right. But I ignored the warning signs, and that is why, perhaps, one night I went too far.

“You are thinking of a former lover,” I said out of the blue one evening, as rain pattered against the windows of 221B and pipe smoke trailed cozily into the air. I had not quite meant to say it aloud, or not so abruptly, but out it came, and when it did I could not take it back.

Watson, whose gaze had been fixed on something in The Pall Mall Gazette for far too long, and with a much mistier quality than I was used to seeing from him, looked up, quite startled, splotches of red rising to his cheeks. “I—” he said, “well, really, Holmes, I don’t know why you would—that is to say—”

I was quite taken aback by this bluster. It was true that I had raised a subject we had not discussed before, but surely we were close enough to do so now.

And then I remembered what was on that particular page of the day’s newspaper, and who—that is to say, what man—was in the accompanying image. Watson saw me realize and fell quite silent, hands gripping the arms of his chair.

“My dear fellow—” The delighted words broke out of me before I could stop them. I shut myself up, closed my mouth, shuttered my expression, became as blank and businesslike as possible; but the damage was done.

Watson’s face grew pinker still, as a smile spread across his face and lit up his beautiful blue eyes.

**

There were months after that that I will not describe at length. I was not kind as I slowly came to face the fact that I had feelings for Watson beyond what the world, for reasons of small-mindedness, and beyond what I, out of a firm wish for my reasoning facilities to remain untouched by the corrosive chemicals of desire and affection, wanted to allow. Watson was patient, but he would not budge an inch. He knew, he said, what he wanted, and he knew what I wanted, too.

He touched me. The small of my back. My elbow. A hand on my shoulder, warm and heavy. A hand on my knee, first briefly, then lingering. A brush of fingers over my hair. The back of my hand. The back of my neck.

I allowed them. They grew more intimate so gradually that there was never a moment when the line between friendship and intimacy was clearly breached. Until, of course, the morning I awoke with him in the bed we were compelled to share while in the countryside for a case, my body—traitorous thing—having wrapped itself around his while we both slept.

We did things, then, and we did things, later. But all throughout, I kept myself closed to him in some essential way. I made no declarations, and my hands on his skin never lingered.

And then, finally, he had had enough.

**

“Give me your hand,” he said to me one evening as we prepared in silence to go to bed together.

My chest was bare and my trousers gaped open. I looked up at him from my seat on his bed. His rich brown eyes, normally full of warmth and admiration, were fixed steadily on mine. He held out a hand. Curiously, I placed mine in his.

He grasped my wrist and pulled it towards the bedpost. Swiftly, he opened the drawer of his bedside table and drew out a length of rope. I am embarrassed to admit that I did not understand what his intentions were until he had the rope looped twice around my wrist, anchored to the bedpost.

“Watson—”

He looped it once more and tied it tight. Then he let me go.

My right hand was affixed to the right bedpost at an awkward angle. I gave it a tug. It didn’t budge.

“You learned this knot in the military,” I said, my brain pushing itself into overdrive as a sort of desperate attempt to reclaim control. “You used it in Afghanistan, most often during the—”

“Silence.” Watson’s voice was sharp.

I stopped talking.

“Give me your other wrist, please.”

“I don’t want to.”

My voice came out strange and cracked. I barely recognized it.

Watson held out a hand.

I offered my wrist. It was true that I did not want to. It was true that a great part of me was crying out to run, to close my arms against all that they might embrace. And yet something, some knowledge deeper than that, stronger than words or the defenses I had raised around my very soul, pushed my hand to move. I offered my wrist and he took it and positioned me on the bed, flat on my back, and stretched my left arm out and tied it to the bedpost.

Caught. I was caught.

I had allowed myself to be caught.

There was something terrible about it. Panic clawed its way up my chest. My skin crawled. I had felt nothing like it since a particularly bad dose of cocaine in my youth, when my body shook and shivered in revolt, entirely independently of whatever I told it to do.

Then Watson put his hand on my chest. A heavy pressure on my sternum, sure and certain. And I could breathe again.

“I understand that this is very difficult for you,” he said to me. His voice was steady and his eyes were clear. “I am sorry for it, my love.”

The words stuck in my chest, lodged themselves in my throat, reverberated in my mind. My love.

“Yes, I love you,” he said patiently. “You love me as well. There is no question about that, Sherlock. I do not think you doubt it. I think you struggle so hard against it because to admit it will split you open and the wound will not be clean.” He bent his head and brushed his lips against mine. “It is fortunate that I am a doctor.”

It was as though my blood was burning in my veins. I could not spit out a response, could not have found the words I would have said even if I had been able to speak. Watson slipped his hands down my lean stomach and finished removing my open trousers and the smallclothes below. I lay pale and naked before him, all my edges sharp—protruding hipbones, jutting ribs—and all the places that ought to have been soft stretched and taut, my belly and hips and neck. My arm was scarred with needle marks and my fingers were stained yellow with tobacco. And my mind—the one glorious, beautiful, worthy part of me—was buzzing emptily. Useless.

Watson, who had only ever wanted to touch every part of me for as long as he desired, ran his hands over my body. He thumbed my nipples and slipped a finger into the sweet sweat of my armpit and caressed the tender skin at the creases of my open thighs. Each touch made my body seize up as if tensing for a blow. But of course I knew better than to tense before a blow; when I fought with my fists, sword, or singlestick, my body bent and swayed and absorbed impact when it had to. When I fought, I knew how to take a hit. When I was lying bound in bed, being loved by the most loyal and steadfast man I have ever met, my body and mind responded as if being flayed open.

He put his mouth on me next. He licked the hollows above my hips and at my throat. He bent lower and took my balls into his mouth. I cried out. He sucked on them gently, his mouth filling with spit.

He raised my legs and, sliding a pillow below my buttocks, put his mouth to my hole.

He sucked at it, and tears dripped from my eyes. It was not so much like crying as like staring into the sun until my eyes watered in protest. A wild vision swam into my head, Watson in the desert, a sandstorm, wind and sharp fine grit pelting his skin. He slipped his tongue into my hole, pressing in as much as he could against its tight resisting nub, and began to loosen me. Sometimes he put his thumb gently alongside his tongue, caressing, ever so slightly pressuring the muscle to relax. I saw him then as a doctor, fingers sure and gentle as he probed a wound. He pushed his face against my wet hole and I gasped as I felt the tip of his nose push ever so slightly in.

I think he would put his whole head inside me if he could, flashed the thought, the first coherent string of words my brain had managed since he’d wrapped the rope around my wrist.

And then I knew that he had already crawled inside me. He was already there, his hand around my heart. If he squeezed, my heart would stop. But he wouldn’t do that. He was going to take care of me.

He already was.

I think he felt my realization. He felt it, frankly, in my arsehole. He opened his mouth wide with a gasp and pressed the flat of his tongue along my crack, licking frantically, obscene squelching sounds mingling with his grunts and gasps. I floated somewhere above him, chest opening up rib by rib, the rush of air into my lungs making me dizzy. I could feel the stubble of his recently-shaved beard rub against the tender skin of my arse, and I welcomed it. Cut me open, I wanted to tell him, hundreds of tiny cuts. I would bleed out for this man. I would let him wriggle his way into every pore and every vein.

At long last he looked up, face pink and shining with spit, breathless, lips puffy. He caught my gaze, and I caught his.

He saw enough there, I think, to understand me.

He bent his head and wrapped his hand around my aching prick. He pulled me off, not especially gently, and I groaned and arched until finally I came. He put his face right in front of me as I did so, mouth and eyes open. I spent all over him. His chin and cheeks and eyebrows were covered when I had finished. There was a drop of my seed caught on his eyelashes.

My wrists were rubbed raw by the ropes, and the marks did not fade for days. The good doctor tended them with the utmost care.

Charles’ heart is pounding. He hasn’t moved for he’s not sure how long, and his foot has fallen asleep underneath him.

He has to tell Julian. He has to tell him.

Tell him what? a voice in his head whispers. That you’re straight? Are you so sure about that?

Charles’ body is alive and restless, heat between his legs and his skin tingling with arousal. He feels as though he has been holding his breath since he started Lu’s fic.

He touches himself. He slips a hand down his pants and grasps himself and gasps and buries his face in the pillow and, the edge of what might be terror at the back of his throat, pulls himself off until he comes hard.

It doesn’t take very long.

He has to tell Julian. 

But if there is a confession to be made, Charles thinks, it’s less to do with the fact that he’s never kissed a man before and more to do with his erstwhile devotion to a certain children’s television program that aired from 1998-2001 and everything that devotion has since grown—mutated—into. It would be far easier to tell Julian, I’m confused by my attraction to you because you are a man than I had your poster on my wall growing up. He’s pretty sure Julian would forgive the first confession. He’s not so sure he could forgive the second.