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She didn’t like leaving Mr. Kapoor in the sitting room alone with Sherlock, but this nonsense had gone quite far enough, so she excused herself to step into the kitchen, where she’d left her mobile. She sent the text:
John,
Collect your flatmate. NOW.
Love,
Your Landlady
She looked down at her hands leaning on the ivory linen cloth draped over her tiny bistro table. When had these become her grandmother’s hands? Loose, tissue-paper skin, raised blue veins. Mottled with spots like a bloody leopard. But unlike a leopard, she wasn’t graceful, sleek, or dangerous. She had been all those things once. Not anymore.
Yet she knew her hands were still as sensitive as they’d been at sixteen or twenty-five or forty. Like the rest of her, still just as sensitive as a young woman, but more experienced, more discerning, more wary.
She’d felt the paper cuts on his index finger and thumb and the pulse beating at his wrist when she’d taken his hand yesterday to extend the invitation. She supposed the paper cuts were an occupational hazard for a librarian, and hoped the thrumming pulse was a sign that he’d say yes.
And indeed, he had.
Just tea with a new acquaintance, if anyone was curious. But they both knew it was a date to see if the particular shape and size of his loneliness might fit comfortably with hers. And indeed, it did.
The conversation and lemon biscuits had lasted until the sun began to set. When twilight shadows gathered at the window, she grew restless, knowing the chill creeping in would grant him reason enough for an arm around her shoulder and a first kiss. And, she hoped, a second. The night and the need that would follow would surely grant them permission for everything else.
Her hands had felt young and shy when she’d stroked his soft dark beard streaked with grey and toyed with the simple white buttons of his shirt as he’d shifted closer on the sofa. But she was sure the shyness would eventually disappear when she found her way to the pocket of warmth between thigh and scrotum, and then wrapped her fingers around his silky length.
The heat and skill of that first kiss were promising, as was the gentle, searching rub of a thumb on her knee, just beneath the hem of her dress. The little scratch of the unhealed papercut drew her attention away from his lemony breath. She noticed the slightest bit of damp in her cotton panties, and wondered what that thumb would feel like sliding across her clitoris. She tentatively licked into his mouth, feeling the flutter of his tongue against hers, and a sympathetic flutter echoing between her thighs.
The shock of Sherlock bounding in unannounced and taking up residence in the rickety chair in the corner of the sitting room had flustered her for a minute or two.
Sherlock's petulant frown when he saw the biscuit crumbs and lifted the almost empty teapot had got her angry. She had been about to tell him to go find his own tea and stop behaving like a child, when he'd stretched his legs across the rug and begun interrogating her guest, who'd seemed to take the sudden change of plans in stride, smiling and answering Sherlock’s intrusive queries as best he could.
“Where are you from? No, not your London address—your ancestral home--somewhere near Delhi, yes? Are you still a practicing Hindu? What is your history at the library? Clearly, you work in the reference division, but not always? When do you plan to retire? Why not—surely you’re old enough? You look positively ancient. You're a widower, I suppose, but how many times over? Your tie is loose and your top button undone--can't you be bothered to look presentable after five o'clock?”
Mrs. Hudson had tried coughs and groans and sharply pointed statements about how late it was, and wouldn’t John and Greg and half of the criminal population of the city be disappointed if Sherlock didn’t run along and get back to work right away.
She'd glared.
She'd tilted her head plantively.
She'd cursed under her breath.
Finally, she'd excused herself and phoned John. He owed her, John did. Many a time she'd dragged a clueless Sherlock downstairs so John could entertain his ladyfriends undisturbed. Although why John didn't try entertaining Sherlock instead, Mrs. Hudson had never really understood.
* * * *
"Hello, Mrs. Hudson, Mr. . . ?"
Sherlock stood and motioned John in, waving him onto a vacant settee. “Kapoor. His name is Mr. Kapoor. You may recognize him from the British Library. We met him once in the Reading Room. ”
“Right, yes. Nice to see you again, Mr. Kapoor. I’m John Watson, and I live upstairs. Just coming to collect my friend, Sherlock, for a . . . a case. I’ve just had an email from a potential client and . . ."
“Not interested. Sit down, John. Don’t be rude. We’re all having an informative chat."
Mrs. Hudson gave John a withering look, and was pleased when he seemed to steel himself to do her bidding. He followed Sherlock's angry gaze to Mr. Kapoor's left hand, which had crept from Mrs. Hudson's knee halfway up her thigh in the course of their conversation. John smiled and cleared his throat.
Within three minutes, the doctor had wrestled and cajoled Sherlock out of 221A using a variety of lies and the whispered threat of bodily injury.
* * * * *
Mrs. Hudson understands Sherlock's discomfort. In the end, she doesn't make a fuss or scold him for trying to scare her suitor away--on this occasion or any of three dozen future occasions when he tries again. But just because she understands it, doesn't make it all right.
No one really likes to see a lady of a certain age slip out of her flowered dress and cardigan and into bed with a dark-eyed, eager stranger. A gentleman whose name she's written out on a bookmark tucked into the novel on her bedside table—within reach of her reading glasses—so as not to forget. So as not to hurt feelings by stumbling about: Oh, Robert (her first, at 16), Oh, Sean (at 25), Oh James (at 40) . . . I’m so sorry, of course—Oh, George. Or worse yet, inflating the man's ego by deifying him to cover up a memory lapse. Oh God, oh God, oh dear Jesus . . .
And no one really likes to imagine a woman who has lost more than one skirmish with gravity and lost the whole bloody war with body chemistry opening bottles of lavender-scented lubricant and oiling a stranger's fingers, showing him lots of ways to keep busy while they wait for his erection to arrive. An erection he assures her used to arrive on a bullet express train, but now--and at least they can laugh about it--seems to prefer the chugging, wheezing local. And no one really wants to hear the moans and giggles and filthy curses when the size and shape of their mutual loneliness and desire create the perfect friction, and everything seems to coil and tense and tremble exactly as it did when she was sixteen and twenty-five and forty and sixty . . .
Sherlock, though unique in most every way imaginable, is not always so special. He wants to stop these things from happening because they don't fit with the facts of Mrs. Hudson as he imagines her. His landlady, not-housekeeper, surrogate mother, and friend. He sees, but he doesn't want to observe.
But John Watson understands, and offers a wink and a kiss on the cheek as they scoot away, promising they won't be back until tomorrow. Late tomorrow.
No wonder Sherlock is so fond of him, she thinks. And then she locks the door and slips out of her cardigan and lets the gentleman unzip her flowered dress, before turning out the lights.