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She knows her way, and he doesn’t. Not really. No more than he learned in a long night in Paris after the flight from Karachi, with a mistress of her trade who accorded him love, and owed him gratitude. Even that, combined with years of uneasy observation of couples in public and casual, if cautious, pornography to suggest what those couples did in private, is not enough to compensate for the obvious….
She knows her way. He does not. With her he is always learning.
He sulks about it. He sulks when she fights back a dimple when he moves to kiss her and bumps their noses and clashes their teeth. He sulks when she gently dabs saliva from his chin and suggests maybe a bit drier would work. He sulks when she asks, upfront, what he’s done, and tells him what she likes.
She smiles, pokes his arm, and leans against his arm and rests her head on his shoulder. “Never mind, Shay. I don’t mind that you’re…whatever you are. I don’t mind that you do this like I dance. Turnabout, right? You teach me the foxtrot, I’ll teach you…about the birds and the bees and the foxes. Right?”
He grimaces, but it turns into a rueful smile, then a chuckle, and then she’s in his lap, her leg flung over as though she were mounting a horse, until she’s kneeling with his thighs trapped between and his cock pressing the inner seam of her jeans, and her arms are wrapped around his neck, and she kisses him…
And kisses him…
And he kisses back, eyes open, brow furrowed, not because he doesn’t like it, but because he’s Sherlock Holmes, and he’s far too busy observing every tiny detail of the event. Then, minutes in, some part of him asks what it would be like to stop seeing the microscope on the table and the empty cup of tea and the pile of medical journals and the laptop showing his searches on the latest criminal cases in London. He closes his eyes and pays attention to feeling, factoring out sight. He tells himself it’s an experiement.
Then he forgets to tell himself anything.
It’s all for a case, of course. If she thinks he loves her, it’s her mistake—human error. He’s read the literature—everything can be faked, falsified, or brought about through methods other than the obvious. Just because a candle is lit, doesn’t mean a spent match lies nearby. It could have been lit with a flick-lighter, or a sunbeam focused through a lens, or from an ember from the fireplace, or the jet of the gas burner in the kitchen.
Just because there is an erection pressing hard against her and he’s panting like an old steam locomotive and breaking out with a sheen of sweat doesn’t mean he really wants her. Wants this. It’s all a ruse, in the end, and she should have considered the possibility of drugs, or interior visualization of fantasies that have nothing to do with her, or a carefully developed conditioned reaction to some otherwise neutral stimulus, for example thinking the word hasenpfeffer to himself over and over and over again as a triggering input.
Even though none of these things are true, and he must admit his body is responding on its own volition.
It’s for a case. Just for a case. He needs to gain access to the offices of Charles Augustus Magnussen. She’s one of his office PAs on shift, in charge of passing people in. And she’s a source of some gossip—she’s a merry girl, and appears to be a favorite with others who need to vent their frustrations with her employer. She detests the man herself.
Perhaps he should take her into his confidence? Then there would be no excuse for this charade, after all. Granted, he chose her of a number available options because she’d be pleasing to keep company with, if he had to put up with anyone to gain access in the first place. His other likely contacts had been an old security guard with bad teeth and a waxed walrus moustache, with a taste for pinochle; and a cleaning woman seven months pregnant who was convinced her sister was sleeping with her husband. (False—her husband was sleeping with her brother.) Of the options, spending time with Janine—spending time this way with Janine—had seemed a delightful alterative.
And, yet…
And yet…
He’d never before required this particular deceit to get where he wished to go.
She kisses well, he thinks, then wonders why he has a standard for good kissing when he has done so little of it previously. His effective, efficient mind instantly deduces an answer: “Good kissing” was any kissing that pleased the subject of the kiss in the present, and increased the likelihood he would want further kissing in the future.
By that standard Janine kisses very well indeed.
She slides a hand down, groping until she finds his own; her fingers tangle around his, and she draws his hand up, draws it under the trim, flexy fabric of her top. Draws it to her breast. She introduces his fingers to the elastic beneath her breast, to the light, gapping lace over her breast—front and back doors. She draws his fingers over the raised hill of her nipple.
He is not, he notices, thinking so well. He doesn’t appear to care as much about that as usual, either. This is like the morphine and heroin he sometimes uses to slow his spinning mind—heady, lush, pleasing and soothing at the same time. And yet his blood races, his breath staggers, rises, falls, fades like that of a runner on his final lap of a long race.
She moves, and he rolls up against her, hunting for contact. She presses herself down to meet him, murmuring deep, heavy vowel sounds as he arches against her and strops himself against her crotch like a cat stropping against warm ankles, against a caressing hand.
They have not yet been to bed. At this rate he has come to wonder why anyone needs to—and to wonder what new heaven bed may yet hold in reserve. It is different from that passionate, thorough, well-thought-out paying off of debts between he and Irene. It shakes him more profoundly, and he doesn’t know why.
She’s slipped her hand under his waistband, unzipped him, drawn him out. Her fingers trace him, lightly, kindly, then grasp him firmly and draw him against her.
One of them moans. Maybe both?
He can’t focus. He doesn’t seem to care.
“God, you’re a darlin’ man,” she says, “whatever kind of man you are.”
“I love you,” she says, and falls over him, hips ratcheting in place, breath forcing a thin, low sound like pigeons brooding on the window ledge. “God, I love you.”
He doesn’t answer—first because he’s too busy, brains exploding, to know or care.
Later because, as he assures himself, it’s all a ruse. It’s for a case. He’s exploiting their connection.
He takes a bath, after, and to his surprise she joins him—a sleek Irish Selkie.
Her eyes amaze him over and over—dark chocolate brown, laughing, so like Lestrade’s he begins to see why his brother looks away from the other agent, seeming blinded by a blaze of imagined light Sherlock himself had never detected.
“I’ve got to go out, later,” he says. “Leaving the phone home. Safer if I don’t take it where I’m going.”
“Back to the house?” she says, knowingly.
He grunts his admission, then says, intensely, “It’s for a case. I’m working a case.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It is,” he insists, hearing a note of ironic perception in her tone.
“Not doubtin’ it, Shez,” she replies, then says, quietly, “Case or no case, though, I bet it makes you just as high, doesn’t it?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Bet you get to itchin’ for it just as much.”
“I need to get noticed.”
“And this is the only way?”
“It’s a scandal. It’s in character.”
“And it’s not the only way—is it, Shay. You’re doin’ it because you chose…and it’s the ‘best’ answer because you chose it. You.”
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he says, then, stuffing cash into his pocket, and the worn and greasy old wallet he’d found in the back skip behind a second-hand the day before, too worn and damaged even for resale. It’s a convincing choice for a junkie’s pocket, he thinks, as he rams it into the soft joggers and ties on his trainers. No one seeing it would doubt he’d had it for years, always too broke to replace it and too drugged to care. He gets up and looks at her, coiled in his armchair, now, wearing his shirt from earlier. “I don’t know when I’ll be in,” he says again. “May be late. May be as late as morning.”
“Want me to stay or go?” she asks.
“Stay,” he says, before realizing he’s spoken.
They’ve slept together, even though they’ve not yet slept together that way. He’s woken to find himself woven around and over her body, his arms vines, his legs long looping roots, holding her close. He’s looked at that lush skin, Irish rose cream tinted with the faintest trace of coffee. He’s heard her snore, and smiled.
“Stay,” he says again.
In his sock index he has hidden a jewelers box with a ring. Soon he will have to use it—use her, to gain access to Magnussen’s offices.
He is hoping to get in and out without difficulty. Perhaps it will all go well, and she’ll never have to know it was all a ruse. He can let her keep the ring, then. Avoid the fight. No need for her to ever know it was all pretense. That it was just for a case.
The yen for the drugs is rattling through him by then. She looks at him with wise eyes, and sighs. “You ever want to give that up, Shay, I’m here. Bet John would help, too. And Mary.”
They don’t know.
“They’re busy,” he says. “And I’m fine. It’s just for a case. It’s not real. I’m in control.”
“Of course you are,” she says, softly, and untangles herself from the chair, her round, sweet thighs and graceful calves and full hips and limber waist and swinging breasts all music played in one sweet long chord as she comes to her feet. She dances over to him, more nimble in his flat that she is on a dance floor, and wraps herself around him, dropping a lingering kiss on his lips. “Take care of yourself, eh, you daftie? Come home when you can. I’ll be here.”
He nods, pulls up the hood of his jumper, and rattles down the stairs to the front door of Baker Street, where he stops and sucks in cool night air, panting lightly.
It’s all for a case. It’s only a ruse.
He turns and sees her, leaning against the upper window, haloed by the low light of the fireplace beyond. He waves. She waves back.
It’s only for a case, he thinks.
I’m in perfect control.