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“It won’t end well,” he says languidly, his eyes fixed on the cultures in front of him.
She frowns, confused. “What won’t?”
“This relationship with the toy boy whom you’ve acquired. Byron or Lloyd or something.”
Leaning a hip against the counter, she quirks a sardonic brow. “Those aren’t even remotely similar to one another and I don’t know anyone with either name.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, since I’m still confused.”
“I saw you leaving two nights in a row with that new phlebotomist.” He rolls his eyes. “Jonesy?”
She coughs, slightly amused. “You mean Garret. He’s worked here a year and you’ve probably met him an excess of eighty times.”
“Irrelevant. Your relationship with him is a non-starter.”
His friendly advice is all it takes for Molly’s expression to segue from amused to fairly annoyed.
She runs a frustrated hand through her hair. “Again, Sherlock?”
“What ‘again?’” He shifts in his seat. “Jared could have some very taboo and dangerous sexual fetishes.”
“You think?” She doesn’t sound concerned.
“Not that I can tell,” he mumbles. “But you can’t be too careful.”
“In his case, I actually think you can. Since he’s asexual.”
Arrested, he turns around once more. “He—then why?”
“That doesn’t preclude us from having a romantic relationship. We don’t,” she clarifies when he frowns, rather than drawing it out. “He’s a friend. I’m helping him find a flat.”
“Oh,” he says, and smiles brightly. “Then carry on.”
“Thanks for the permission.” Her tone has no facsimile of real gratitude. “You didn’t interfere with Tom, so I know you’re capable of leaving well enough alone. Why Garret? Why now?”
Instead of answering, he stands and pulls on his coat. “Well, I’ll be off. Don’t throw out this agar.”
She hurries around and shoves her way in between him and the door, blocking his exit. “No.”
“Move, Molly.”
Metaphorical heels dig in. “No.”
Shrugging, he starts to move forward, but she puts a hand up and baldly says, “If you even think about picking me up and moving me, I will codge you over the head with a fire extinguisher.”
That plan foiled, his eyes narrow further. “I have important work to be done. Move.”
She crosses her arms and looks at him steadily. “Not until you answer my question.”
He looks bored. “You can’t keep me here.”
“Call it a hostage situation. You’ll be free to go when you give me what I want. Simple enough.”
“I’ll call Mycroft.”
“I’m telling on you to Mummy,” she shoots back, adopting a mimicking, deep tone.
He calmly tilts his head, though his eyes are flashing. “Grow up.”
She studies her nails. “I know you are, but what am I?”
“That doesn’t even make any sense,” he says with a blink.
Molly pulls out an old standard. “Neither does your face.”
“When you use the ‘your face’ insult for everything, it starts to lose its impact.”
“Call it a favorite stand-by,” she shrugs. “I’m waiting.”
Growling, he paces away, a tiger in a Molly-made cage. “You can’t make me talk.”
She looks thoughtful. “I got my first period when I was thirteen. It wasn’t the easiest time, especially not having a mother around to help me. Somehow, I muddled through, but I have always had a rather heavy flow—”
“I’m not a sexist clot who is put off by menstruation. Don’t insult me.”
She accepts this and switches tack. “Do you like Barbra Streisand?”
He eyes her warily, not answering.
“I doubt you’ve had much occasion to listen to her. My favorite song of hers is ‘Emotion.’ Not because it’s even remotely good, but because I had a cabbie recently who was in the music video with her. Here, I’ll pull it up.”
She digs her mobile out of her lab coat and opens YouTube. When she locates the video, she turns the phone so the screen faces him and doesn’t break eye contact as she dramatically presses Play.
What follows is approximately thirty seconds of wincing, fifteen seconds of appalled glaring, and another fifteen of visible twitching. The song has barely passed the minute mark when he buckles.
“We had a contract!”
She switches off the jangling and replaces the phone to her pocket. “What contract? I didn’t sign anything.”
“It was verbal.” He tugs at his hair. “You were going to stop pursuing other romantic liaisons if you and Tonka didn’t work out.”
She laughs humorlessly. “I never made any promise of the sort. Not even tacitly.”
With unwavering confidence, he insists, “You most certainly did.”
“How the hell did I imply something so mind-bogglingly barmy?”
“You said I’m your type.” He holds his hands up triumphantly, ask if expecting her to say, ‘A hit! A palpable hit!’
Shaking her head, she tries keep up. “What?”
“After I came back. At Shilcott’s. I said congratulations on your engagement, you went into too much detail about how happy you were—lies always are too detailed— I said, ‘Glad he’s not a sociopath,’ decided I was hungry, and left. But as I was leaving, you yelled after me, ‘Sociopaths are my type, since I’m in love with you.’”
She gawps at him. “I never said that. I said, ‘Maybe sociopaths are just my type.’ As in, it wouldn’t surprise me if Tom turned out to be a sociopath, or your limited, frankly insulting definition of one. And I did not yell after you that I’m in love with you.”
He scowls, repiecing the event from his selective memory. Sulkily, he concedes, “You might as well have done.”
She has a migraine building, she’s sure of it. She pinches the webbing between her forefinger and thumb. “So you decided, ‘If this goes bunk, poor old thing will be finished with men, so she’ll just become a nun’?”
“I merely thought you had accepted that I was the only one for you and that’s why you ended things with Thrawn.”
She laughs bitterly. “That was the point of the whole sociopath conversation: how good it was that I’d found someone who could love me, since it wouldn’t be you. How was I supposed to know you’d change your tune? You supported my engagement while it was on and you certainly haven’t jumped my bones in the six months since it ended. ”
“I was working my way up to it,” he snarls.
“Shall I pencil you in for 2025, then? I only ask so I know how long until I get to have something 'twixt my nethers that isn’t battery-operated.”
He stalks up to her, bending at the last moment so his shoulder nudges into her belly, his arm curling around her upper thighs. The moment she folds over with a surprised ‘ooph’, he straightens once more and swivels, patting her leg with his free hand in acknowledgment of her enraged shriek as he carries her slung over his shoulder.
“You bastard. Put me down, William.”
“Pulling out all the stops, I see.” He has the gall to chuckle. “As if calling me by my real name still frightens me like it did when I was five.” And then he dumps her unceremoniously on a counter top.
Sputtering to get rid of the hair that slipped over her face while she was upside-down, she speaks with dead calm. “If you ever do that again, I’ll revoke every bit of access you have to this hospital.”
He apologizes, sincerely as far as she can tell, but hastily. “I won’t. Now be quiet.”
“You’re not in a position to give me orders.”
Nodding, he shifts over a bit so her knees press into his belly. “No, but I’m trying to do something, so quit yelling. Please.”
“Something besides manhandle me? What’s that?”
“I believe the phrase you used was ‘jump your bones.’” The counter has made her just a bit taller than he, so when cups her neck and face, he has to pull her head down for her mouth to meet him in a rough kiss as he eases her knees apart and steps into her.
In spite of her agitated growls, she returns the affection. In fact, she returns it for several, breathless minutes, until sense resurfaces a little.
“This doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten that you spent half a year assuming I had nothing better to do than wait around for you,” she mumbles against his lips. Meanwhile, her hands clutch at him in the warm space between his blazer and shirt.
He gives her tongue a bracing swipe with his and smoothes one palm under her shirt, up along the sensitive skin of her back before he replies. “I’ve spent the last three-and-a-half years waiting for you. So we move more slowly than most people. It hardly matters if the end result is this.” His free hand fiddles with the buttons of her blouse, moving them in and out of their holes.
She bites his bottom lip and draws back slightly, only releasing him when he rumbles low in his chest. “Just to be clear, you are not going to make it with me on the counter of my lab.” She has to reach behind her to still the hand currently having a go at her bra clasp.
“I’m sure we can find an empty room with beds.” He starts to pull away and turn, and she knows he fully intends to go on a hunt.
Staying his departure by hooking her legs around his hips and crossing her ankles, she shakes her head, both to stop him from gallivanting off to find a place for them to shag and to clear her bamboozled head. “No sex in hospital.” His lips curl evilly in challenge, so she adds, “I mean it.”
He sighs gustily and turns back. “First I was taking my sweet time and now I’m being too impulsive.” His hands curl around her knees, lightly tickling the undersides. “Make up your mind.”
“I thought this entire day was an exercise of you trying to make up my mind for me,” she says archly, grinning when he yelps after she pinches his nipple through his shirt. They tussle for a bit until he has her arms pinned down at her sides, his banded around her and his face buried in her neck, kissing and sucking the skin there to her humming satisfaction.
“And that worked so well,” he laments to the sensitive spot just below her ear. “I accept that I never will manage it, probably. Now. Can we leave?”
She wrestles an arm free to look at her watch. “I can take off a little early.” Grinning at him, she squeezes his hips with her thighs. “Just think, Sherlock. If we leave now and get making with the love right away, we’ll have time to watch Strictly Come Dancing live afterwards. Not recorded like usual. It’s Christmas,” she teases.
“Get making with the love?” he parrots.
“I’ve always been a poet.” She hops off of the counter and hurries towards her office, calling back behind her, “Grab my phone from under the table, would you? It fell out my pocket when you did your Neanderthal act.”
“Fine.” He stoops and picks her mobile up, dropping it in his pocket. “Have plans to make some calls, too, if our carnal communion ends on schedule?”
“Only fifty or so of my closest friends.” She switches off the lights and moves back to him. “But I mostly want it because my music’s on it. I know this great song that will really get us in the mood.”
“I thought we were in the mood, which is why you’re skiving off work an hour early. What about this song could possibly do more?”
“Oh, it’s so sexy,” she enthuses. “Maybe you’ve heard it. It’s called ‘Emotion’, by Barbra Streisand.”
He groans and nudges her through the door with a gentle knee to her bottom. but he can’t hide his grin as she reaches back to take his hand.