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“Stop looking at me like that.”
He frowned, “like what?”
“Like you feel every emotion known to man right here.” She placed a hand on his chest, feeling the erratic heartbeat through the layers of fabric, then dropped it. “And you know it’s not enough. Your heart is brimming with them to the point they spill from your eyes. It’s the only way you can find reprieve, staining the others with your love in the most subtle of ways. A coffee stain you notice only once you’ve sat at your desk.”
He stayed silent for a bit, ruminating through his thoughts to find any clever quip to deny her. He came up empty. There was nothing to deny.
“But not you,” he said, “you notice instantly.”
“Of course I do.” She took a drag from a cigarette, letting the smoke fall between her red lips. “It burns me.”
His eyes widened. An unpleasant thought creased his brow, did he hurt her? Why? How? This didn’t make any sense. Has he been hurting her all this time?
“It’s okay, really,” she said, eyeing him with a half-smile, “I’ve gotten used to it.”
His eyes met hers. The streetlights hit them at an angle that kindled a fire in the irises. It did nothing to hide the hurt.
How had he not noticed?
“I’ve just always known you as someone who burns,” he blurted. And then swallowed hard, wishing the sentence had stayed stuck in his throat.
But, it was the truth. How her laughter lifted the mood like sunlight peaking through curtains, how her taunts fell on him like loose embers from standing too close to the fireplace, how her skin was ardent to the touch. His cold, distant touch. Although he never pegged himself as poetic, it was a truth that unravelled before him only in the form of prose.
She contemplated a bit, then nodded with a small laugh. “In a way, yes.” She casted her gaze down to her boots. One knocked a pebble aside, which rolled inches away. “But only around those I’ve fallen for.”
He let out a shaky breath, leaning his head back to look at the night sky. This was it. This was what he had been waiting and fearing and hoping for. A confession. Ever since he looked at her that one day under the fluorescent lights of the laboratory and felt his chest swell in this indescribable way. He had sat there stunned, frozen. His heartbeat thudding in his ears. The minute she left, he felt himself return slowly to normal. His hand hastily gripped a pen and jotted down every single symptom on his notepad. He spent the next days muttering to himself. Running subtle experiments around her, with her. Driving himself mad with data and theories and more data and more theories because it couldn’t possibly be… No, it couldn’t. But then John noticed months later and asked and asked and he caved. He gave the pile of notes to his friend like a sinner with hands drenched crimson red, never one to be pious but suddenly found on his knees with a lip-lined plea.
It hung in the air of the flat, unsaid. One glance at John’s face and it was obvious that he knew. When he stopped reading, they both exchanged a long look. It was understood. It will hang in the air of the flat, unsaid.
But, he wasn’t in the flat with her. They were out on the sidewalk, a lighter in his hand and a cigarette in her mouth.
For the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to say. She just did the very thing he waited, feared, and hoped for and he didn’t know what to say. He could tell that she grew nervous under this silence dotted by faint sirens, loud crickets, whipping wind. He noted how the breeze put her cig out. His fingers gently took it from her lips and brought it to his own. His tongue tasted the cherry of the stains that her tinted chapstick had left. His other hand offered the lighter, which she took, fingertips brushing his skin, eyes fixing on him.
A lighter in her hand and a cigarette in his mouth, asking, will you burn me?
And so did she. The flame flickered inches before his eyes. And it was gone.
“I’ve… I’ve never been good at this. Emotions. Desires…” He paused. “Love.” He locked eyes with her. “But, you make me want to be.”
She looked down, attempting to hide the blush that rose on her cheeks. “That’s a start, I guess.” She chuckled, then shook her head. “Look, Sherlock, you really don’t have to… I know that… That this is all you could ever give me… A coffee stain.” She huffed angrily, shifting her weight. “Fuck, I keep running around in bloody circles. What I’m trying to say is—“
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“Don’t say it,” he said, “You’d be wrong if you do.”
“Oh! I’d be wrong? I’d be wrong to say that you’re not in love with me?” She fumed. Her voice rose with every word. “Or that— That you’re not capable of loving me the way I love you? Reeaally? Because that has literally been what you’ve been saying all this time. Since day fucking one. Going on about high functioning sociopath, a broken human— ”
He winced.
“I... I’m sorry.”
The sirens wailed.
“Sherlock?” She sighed, running a hand through her hair. “Look, I just— I just don’t understand you. One second you’re looking at me like, like I’m the only thing that exists, and then I believe it. I believe in us. But then the moment vanishes and so do I. It’s like, in a split second, I become nothing. Your eyes turn so cold, so stony, like that”—she pointed at his face—“and it’s hard to not believe the lie you sell.”
His lip quivered, “It is not a lie.”
“Sherlock, you are not broken.”
He turned away.
“You’re wrong.” He persisted, feeling his cheeks dampen and salt tinge his tongue. “An unbroken man would be able to...” He laughed hollowly. “He would be able to realize that he’s fallen for her the moment it happens. He would be able to walk up to her and say it. Loud and clear. He would be able to say, I love you.”
He glanced behind him. He saw the mascara that lined her cheeks. He saw the light in her eyes, but it had grown so faint, so weak.
He turned again, throwing the shortened bud to the ground and putting it out with his foot.
“I simply can’t.”
There was nothing but silence for a few moments, until his ears perked at the clicking of boots across the pavement. The front door creaked open, and he expected to hear it slam. But it didn’t.
He finally looked at her.
She stood at the threshold, where the streetlights couldn’t touch her, dressed in shadows. For the first time in his life, she didn’t look like she was burning.
“So, I was right,” she said, facing away from him, “you’ll never love me the way I love you.”
The door slammed shut.
He stood still, feeling the indescribably swell in his chest, but just now realizing how it felt a lot like burning.