Work Text:
“Fancy meeting you here.”
I looked up from my coffee (too cold and vaguely acidic, covered by necessity in a veneer of sugar-packets) to see the last person I’d expected to run into here, Irene Adler, the woman I’d first met as an old college friend of Jim’s but had lately discovered (along with the rest of the city) to be one of London’s most premiere dominatrices.
Those two identities were not so mutually exclusive as I’d once thought.
Still, she was a friendly face, and I was feeling vaguely at sea. The group billed itself as a “support and education network for LGBT people and their friends and family”; I was not entirely comfortable claiming the first label, though I did sometimes wonder, and with my relationship with Jim now firmly over, I certainly wouldn’t put myself readily in the latter. But I had kissed a woman -- this woman -- because my boyfriend had suggested it, While he watched. While he got off on it, in every sense. And who then turned around to flirt with another man while I was in the room, leaving me to look and feel the fool. I wasn’t entirely sure where I fit into all this, but neither was I entirely free of it all. And I was glad to have at least one person who could come to her own conclusions, and not need me to explain myself.
And just then, I was glad to have a familiar face (even this face, where everything was so s and not ask me to situate myself in it all.
I smiled wryly. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.”
“You should try the tea next time,” Irene offered. “The food at these things is reliably awful, but it’s hard to mess up Tetley’s. Plus they have chocolate digestives.”
“I have a friend -- did Jim ever introduce you to -- “ I began before realizing I probably shouldn’t mention Sherlock’s checkered history with opiates to someone I wasn’t even sure knew his name. “He was in recovery some years back,” I finally said. “Took me to a few of his meetings after he came out of rehab. But I think this” -- I gestured at the table before us -- “might actually have it beat.”
“I hate the sweets at these things,” Irene confided. She opened up her jacket and I saw the packet of Kitkats peeking out of her inside pocket. “That’s why I come prepared. You should find me after. Bring your tea, and I’ll save a piece for you.”
“Irene,” I said. “You should know. I’m, I’m not. I’m not actually a -- “
Across the room, a man tapped a microphone wired into the podium, sending a stream of static across the room and effectively cutting off our conversation. Irene pressed her lips together in a frown. “People can have the worst timing, can’t they?” She half-turned toward the circle of chairs across the room, hesitating. Oscillating between the twin risks of rushing this conversation or trying to pick up the strands again later, until she finally settled on a third option. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand,” she said in a truly lamentable impression of Humphrey Bogart. “I know a decent fish-and-chips stand three blocks over. Reasonably deserted this time of night; certainly more private than here. We should talk.”
I let myself be led away, but still, a moment’s hesitation niggled at me. “Just talk?”
“It’s not always about sex, you know,” Irene said with a scowl. “Yes, I get paid to rodger men, and women, when I couldn’t get them off any other way. And yes, I have a girlfriend with whom I am every bit as intimate as you might imagine. We also curl up on the sofa together, watching Graham Norton while she rubs my feet. Much like you and Jim with Glee.” She smiled at that. “And I really cannot thank you enough for that last piece of knowledge.”
I opened the door, and we made our way out into the street. “I should probably ask -- “ I said.
“Jim and I never slept together,” Irene said. “Not really my cup of tea, men. Though I must say, I quite liked the attention. The …. directing.”
I thought back to that night the previous summer; the feel of Irene’s well-worn pyjama bottoms and her hair falling free around her shoulders, rasping over my knuckles. Jim had sat across the room with his flies undone, but whatever he was doing himself, it was his voice that had made my breath catch in my throat. Telling Irene to touch me just there, his voice gone low with his own arousal, the juxtaposition between Irene’s smooth touch and Jim’s husky intonations ….
Yes. I could understand the appeal. Even now, I felt myself blushing.
“It was actually his idea that I -- follow you here, tonight. He wanted to keep a weather eye on you, after your separation, but I impressed on him in no uncertain terms that ex-boyfriends lost that particular privilege. So I did.”
I laughed at that. “He never was particularly good with boundaries. And I did wonder about that. Surely there are other such groups nearer to Belgravia where you’d feel more comfortable?”
Irene shrugged, and I was struck for the first time by how unassuming she seemed in the outfit she wore tonight. Slacks, blouse, cardigan, sensible heels, hair tied back into an unassuming bun: she might have been an administrator in the hospital. “I have been known to frequent Ayten Gasson for my professional attire, true enough, but for my day-to-day, Marks & Spencer serves me as well as Saville Row.”
“I never saw Jim in so much as a suit -- IT, you know -- until -- well, after.” The pool, the snipers’ sites, the Semtex. The cruel play-acting of thought-you-might-call. The Westwood suit that looked so unlike the man I thought I’d known, captured on security footage and shown to me by John and Sherlock as they pressed me for information on a man I wasn’t sure I knew at all, by that point. “I wondered if you were playing a part, too, all soft flannels and well-worn tees when I just happened to meet you in his flat.”
“Jim Moriarty was a right bastard,” Irene admitted. “I won’t deny that. And for all I know, he did mean for us to meet at his flat. But he truly did care for you, and he worried how you’d handle it all after you separated.” She paused. “I didn’t realize how inexperienced you were, before that night. Jim’s interests run to extremes, and you’d been dating for months at that point. If I’d known more, I never would have played with you that night. Hardly a gentle introduction to the sapphic arts, particularly if you enjoyed it as much as you seemed to.”
“I meant what I said before: I’m not. I’m actually not. It was exciting, yes, kissing you, but it was for Jim, and I don’t regret that.”
“And yet I found you at a support group with a very particular purpose. Don’t tell me you went for the coffee.” A pause. “Why were you there, Molly? It’s been months since you and Jim broke it off. Why tonight?”
I found myself fiddling with my coat’s clasps. “We received a boy today in the morgue. Perhaps sixteen years old. Homeless by all appearances. He was beaten by a street gang until a broken rib punctured his liver, and he hemorrhaged. Well, we undress him and find he’d bound his breasts down. No penis. A pre-operative transsexual boy, you see, and the hepatologist, he paid more attention to the anatomy between the boy’s legs than he did his lacerated liver. He wasn’t precisely unprofessional, you understand …”
“But he was fixated,” Irene offered.
I nodded. “And the boy, I keep wondering if he’d been disowned somehow by his family. By his dental work, he’s Romanian, recent immigrant too. He was clearly on hormones. You see family drama, sometimes, with runaways. And I wondered, too, about Jim: how he could sleep with me, fool me so thoroughly, then flirt so brazenly with another man. Right in front of me! What that said about him. About me, that I didn’t see it. And that I didn’t mind so much, it being with another man. Better than a woman, someone with whom I was actually in competition, you see.” Better than you. I swallowed. “I wondered too, about -- about us. Actually. Or not us, we’re not like that of course, but the kiss.”
Irene reached over, running a well-manicured finger along my jaw as she turned my head so we faced each other. “You liked it, the kiss,” she said, “Maybe just a little, maybe so little you thought it was more about Jim than me, back then. But you wondered about that, too.”
“I wanted to listen to the people who go to that kind of groups,” I said. “Just listen. And I wanted to think.”
We stood there for a long moment, Irene’s hand holding my jaw loosely in something just short of a caress. Our breaths fogged in the November night’s air, intermingling in the space between us. Eventually, she let her hand drop, grasping my gloved one between us.
“I think we should try something,” she said after a moment. “I would very much like to kiss you, Molly Hooper. Just a kiss, and just for us. If you want me to stop, you need only let go of my hand.”
I remembered the night at Jim’s, the last time our lips had been so close, her breath ghosting across my lips; and I wondered what it would feel like, to have that without the possibility of it all being for Jim’s benefit. I found myself nodding my consent, but then I remembered her earlier words. “Wait. You have a girlfriend. Didn’t you say?”
Irene ran her thumb along the inside of my wrist, fondly. “Kate would understand, should it come to that. Such is the cost of being married to a paid sex worker. But actually” -- here she chuckled -- “I didn’t quite mean it like that. Think of it as an experiment, or an experience, of sorts. I just think it would be good for you, quite good, to kiss a woman when there’s no one else, no man, around to see.”
The street was relatively deserted, as empty as London ever was, and what few people had passed by were utter strangers to me. We were alone. That somehow gave the prospect of a kiss an entirely different quality. Less charged, but no less welcome.
“And after that,” Irene added, “we will go get our fish and chips, consume three days’ worth of lard, and talk about something else entirely.”
“All right,” I found myself saying. “Yes.”
I leaned forward, felt first her breath and then her lips against my own. Wrapped my free hand around hers in a double embrace, so there could be no question of my continued interest. The angle was less than ideal, her heels giving her a good two inches on me, so I tilted my head back trying to capture her lips more fully (her upper lip rested just below my nose, and it tickled, distractingly).
Still, she would not deepen the kiss. She was solid, she was there, her lips now properly against mine and her thumb tracing intimate curlicues against the inside of my wrist, but there was no urgency, no demand for anything beyond just this. And then her fingers were pushing out against my hand, easing my own grip on her, as she leaned back just enough to break contact.
I looked over at her quizzically. “Sometimes it’s just that,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more, and that’s glorious too, but sometimes it’s just foot-rubs while Graham Norton drones on. And that’s good, too.”
Her free hand rested at the nape of my back but only for a moment, so she could nudge me on down the path. She was asking about the boy in the morgue, whether we had identified him and offering whatever influence she had to avoid bureaucratic delays; apparently, she knew a man with some pull with the CCTV, or knew what he liked.
I guessed this was a play at distraction, not incorrectly, but even so, I could not wholly forget the feel of those lips against mine. I would welcome them back again. Or not those lips (not now, not to steal them away from that other woman -- but should Irene’s and my paths cross in some better future…. ). But certainly lips like them: smooth, gentle, knowing. They promised freedom, freedom from having to be a good girl, to guard myself, and the freedom to simply be. That promise was a heady gift indeed.
Just now, though, Irene was also promising good chips and better conversation, and that was not to be undervalued.