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I.
Sherlock drags me to Manchester on a Thursday afternoon because four men have been killed after nights out in the Gay Village.
“Just so we’re clear,” I tell him, “I took five days’ annual leave because I was meant to be having a holiday.”
I had planned to spend them on a beach somewhere. Or perhaps closer to home, but not in Manchester and not with Sherlock. I had imagined lots of sleep, cocktails with little umbrellas, perhaps a pub garden if England performed one of its occasional miracles with the weather. Instead, I'm standing in a hotel room near Canal Street while Sherlock dismisses my imaginary holiday as dull, empties case files across one of two double beds and informs me that we have been together for eighteen months.
“Together?”
“A couple, John. Do keep up.”
He maps out our relationship with the same brisk confidence he uses to reconstruct a crime scene: we met in London, we live together, I do most of the cooking, he forgets I'm around, I help with his work, he interrupts mine. I'm a doctor, he's a consultant. Not really imaginative storytelling, I point out.
“Closer to the truth makes better lies, John.”
Outside, Manchester gleams after the rain, red brick darkened almost purple and tramlines catching the evening light. It's a vibrant city, yes, but it still smells somewhat industrial to me. Beyond the window lies the canal and, strung along it, the bars and clubs our dead men visited before somebody took them away from their friends, isolated them, dumped them like rubbish. We are here because two unattached men asking questions look like police, while two men on a long weekend together will blend into the crowd. I complain about the plan, about my leave, about the indignity of spending my holiday investigating murder.
I don't say anything when he looks up from the photographs and says, “Eighteen months should suffice. We wouldn’t have to look besotted. Merely fond of each other. We should be able to do that, don't you think? Look like we're fond of each other?”
Something in the question catches at me. I tell him he’s an idiot and go to shower.
II.
The first night teaches me how quickly a lie can acquire a life of its own. At the beginning, we make rules. Simple enough so we don't forget what we're supposed to be doing. Touch when someone is looking. Stay close enough to be read as a pair. If separated, find one another again. Then the music gets louder, the rooms darker, the drinks stronger, and the rules blur into simpler things: Sherlock’s shoulder beneath my hand as I lean past him at the bar, his fingers closing around my wrist when he wants my attention, my palm at the small of his back while we squeeze through a crowd. This is normal. It feels normal. We crowd each other all the time, don't we?
Men look at him. Sherlock in a dark shirt with the collar open is an act of public disorder, all long limbs and pale throat and that face sharpened by coloured light. One bloke buys him a drink. Another touches his arm. A third bends towards his ear, and I am beside Sherlock before I know it, taking the glass from his hand and saying, “There you are, love,” with such easy familiarity that Sherlock’s eyes brighten. He approves of the game. He thinks I’m good at this. I'm not often better at something than Sherlock, but I've got an advantage here. I've actually dated in the past few years, and I haven't known him to go out with anyone.
He begins following my lead, leaning into me when somebody approaches, letting his knee settle against mine beneath a table, turning his face towards me with the private concentration he usually reserves for a really good locked-room murder. Or me. Apparently men are flirting with me too. Sherlock points this out after the second bar, and looks delighted when he realises that I haven’t noticed. I haven’t noticed because I keep looking for him. He keeps wandering away, the lanky git. Every time someone speaks to me, some part of my attention remains elsewhere, keeping track of where Sherlock is, who is beside him, whether he is smiling, whether he is about to run off and get killed. I tell myself this is vigilance; we're on a case. Afghanistan trained it into me; Baker Street perfected it. Then Sherlock gives me one of those private, teasing smiles and starts telling me that if I pull, I can have the room, before I cut him off and remind him I'm not gay. He just looks amused. He was winding me up.
By the time we walk back along the canal after midnight, my hand has found his again. No one is close enough to notice it. We don't mention it. We don't let go either.
III.
Manchester in daylight is already moving when I wake, as if the city has been up for hours before I’ve even opened my eyes. It should restore some sense to me, the kind of clean, ordinary clarity that comes with morning light and people going about their lives as though nothing unusual is happening anywhere. Instead, Friday belongs to Sherlock. We follow the dead men through museums and cafés, through a gallery where Sherlock becomes entranced by a detail in a seventeenth-century frame, through streets where old warehouses stand beside glass towers, the city's newness built around its history. Trams slide past like patient metal insects, bells chiming at crossings, commuters spilling out in waves that part and reform again. Delivery bikes thread through traffic, office workers queue for coffee beneath awnings still damp from last night’s rain, and everywhere there is the low, constant hum of a city refusing to pause for anything as small as murder.
Sherlock is curious about everything. That gets forgotten sometimes, beneath the arrogance and the deductions and the spectacular talent for making strangers want to punch him. He loves knowing things. He loves finding the small door in the world that everybody else has walked past and throwing it open. I watch him coax information from a museum curator he offended three minutes earlier, watch his hands move as he explains a connection between two victims, watch the quick flare of pleasure when a theory survives contact with evidence, and think, God, he’s brilliant. It's not a new thought; everyone knows he's brilliant. My best friend is brilliant; the sky is blue; Mrs Hudson is not our housekeeper. All simple, straightforward facts.
Then we run into a man who saw us the night before. Sherlock sees him a fraction before I do and catches my hand. “Darling,” he says, with appalling fluency, and steals a forkful of food from my plate. The man smiles in recognition. Sherlock smiles back. After he leaves, Sherlock frowns and announces that the cover must remain consistent whenever we are outside the hotel. From then on, there are new rules. His fingers lace through mine at crossings. He takes coffee from my cup rather than ordering his own. I brush crumbs from the corner of his mouth. He loops an arm through mine while reading something on his phone. He calls me John in one breath and sweetheart in the next, testing the words for the cover rather than in tenderness, and I find out there and then that tenderness could not give two shits about why it's been summoned. By late afternoon every street seems to have acquired some small intimacy of ours. Sherlock’s thumb moves once across my knuckles while we wait for the lights to change, and I carry the sensation with me for the next three streets.
IV.
That night we go dancing again, and Sherlock is better at being my boyfriend than he was yesterday. He's a fast learner. Why should that surprise me? His hand settles comfortably at my waist; he bends close to speak into my ear because the music is too loud and leaves his mouth there an instant after the sentence is finished; he steals my drink, smiles when I object, returns it with his fingerprints damp upon the glass. He has watched everything I did last night, learnt it, and now it's his own, because this is what Sherlock does with the world: he observes, learns, improves.
When men approach him now, he glances towards me as though we share a joke. I answer by moving closer. It has become our language. Then he laughs at something I say, properly laughs, head tipped towards mine and eyes bright, and I see our whole ridiculous life at once. The kitchen at Baker Street. His violin under my chair in the sitting room. Tea going cold beside crime-scene photographs. His coat hanging over mine. His name lighting my phone at two in the morning even though he's next door. His insults, his sulks, his experiments, his arrogance. His insecurities, his blind spots, his joy, his hunger. His blood, the frailty of his drugged body, his tears. Every dangerous street I have followed him down and every morning I have woken knowing he is on the other side of the wall. I've called him my best friend all this time, and I haven't been wrong. I just haven't been saying enough, haven't seen all of it. Oh, fuck. I love him. And once I know it, I can't understand how I've missed it. The knowledge is quiet and enormous, something that has been there for years waiting for me to look straight at it. I love Sherlock Holmes. I love him enough that my entire life has been bent around the fact all this time. That is why I look for him in every room. That is why I follow him, feed him, coax him, fight with him. That's why I've yelled at him, cried for him, chased The Woman and threatened her for hurting him. That is why pretending to love him has felt less like a cover with every passing hour.
I stand in the middle of a Manchester club with Sherlock’s hand warm against my side and understand that the only false part of our relationship is the claim that he feels the same.
V.
There is a man we need to speak to, someone who knew the latest victim and has been avoiding every direct question we ask. He likes Sherlock. That has been obvious since Thursday. Sherlock knows it too, and tonight he uses the fact because of course he does; information is information, whatever shape the door takes. The man joins us on the dance floor. Sherlock lets him stay and gives me a sign. I walk away. I can manage this. I have watched him charm suspects, witnesses, killers, receptionists, grieving widows and once a customs officer who should have arrested us. Sherlock's got this. This is him at work, and I love watching him perform, don't I?
The man puts a hand on Sherlock’s hip. Sherlock turns towards him, listening as he speaks close to his ear. I can see the calculation in Sherlock’s face, his attention fixed on whatever thread he is pulling loose, and I know this has nothing to do with me. That knowledge should help. It does not. I've known I'm in love with him for less than an hour, and already it's chased every sensible thought out of my head. The man says something. They move together beneath the lights, close now, the crowd pressing around them, and then the man kisses him. Sherlock lets him. Worse, Sherlock kisses him back, and if Sherlock truly thinks his body is merely transport, then he's giving the man the ride of his bloody life with that mouth. I watch his hand slide from the man's shoulder to his nape, cup his head, angle it. I watch somebody else get Sherlock's mouth, and, oh God, that's when the thought finally comes clear: I've spent years thinking of it as nobody's. But if it's somebody's, it should be mine. Jealousy is too small a word for what happens to me. Grief comes closer. Loss, perhaps, absurd as that is, because nothing has been taken from me; nothing was ever mine.
Sherlock looks towards me over the man’s shoulder, calculating, communicating something I cannot read, something about the case, something about murder, something I do not give a fuck about right now. He expects me to play my part. I cannot. I turn away, shove through the bodies packed between me and the door and hear him call my name once behind me. Outside, rain has started again. Canal Street shines under the lamps, every colour doubled in the wet pavement, beautiful enough to make the whole bloody evening cruel. I keep walking. I have spent two days pretending Sherlock Holmes is mine, and now that I know I love him, I discover how much it hurts to remember he isn’t. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't—
VI.
The sun is grey and low. We did not close the curtains. John’s arm is heavy across my chest, his breath warm on my skin. His hair is mussed, and there’s a catch like a purr at the end of every inhale. There’s so much about this man that I don’t know. An intolerable amount, considering how many years I have spent thinking I knew everything there was to know about him. I open a new wing in my mind palace just for him, for this, for whatever newness he’ll bring to my life once he wakes.
It was three in the morning and the air was biting when I found him leaning against the railing, looking down at the dark water of the canal, neon lights twinkling across its surface. I was annoyed that he’d left, then confused, then scared. I thought perhaps he had taken John, perhaps John had given chase on his own. But no. John was there, alone, angry, and I didn’t know what I had done wrong this time. Then John was yelling and his fists were clenching, and I still couldn’t understand what had pushed him into such fury until—oh.
His hands were in my hair and his mouth was on mine. Lips against lips, the kiss closed-mouthed and painful, but not because John was hurting me. No. It was painful because John was hurting. John was crying. I held his face, my hands spreading the tears across his cheeks, the day’s stubble rough beneath my palms, and the kiss opened. A wounded sound came from John’s mouth and, with it, years of certainty gave way beneath me. How did I not see it? How could I have looked at him so closely and still missed this? All the touches and contradictions. The endless parade of anodyne women he insisted on dating. The times he left and the times he came back. All those years of John choosing me in every way he allowed himself to do it, and I had never understood what he was giving me. What he wanted to take.
John, my John, shepherded me back to the hotel as he has shepherded me to hospitals, to my room to sleep, to Scotland Yard to give statements, pulling me along as he does whenever I need him to take over. I don’t tell him. He knows. He always knows. Other people see me running ahead; what they don’t see is that he has always been the wind under my wings, the force propelling me forwards. I have been able to run so far only because some part of me has always trusted that John would follow. And now that force was taking off my coat, unbuttoning my shirt, chuckling—have I ever told him I love his laughter? His voice? Him?—and asking whether I was going to help. I hadn’t noticed I was simply standing there, taking it all in, letting John do the work. I wanted to remember everything: his hands, his smile, the unfathomable gentleness of being wanted by him.
My John. My sun.
I helped, and soon we were barer than we had ever been before. We have been naked together many times—held hostage, trapped in overheating rooms, or simply crossing paths as two bachelors sharing rooms—but never bare like this, with hearts and eyes and wants laid clear. I had never thought nakedness meant having nothing left to conceal. I know better now. We didn’t really know what we were doing, what with him being Not Gay and this being Not My Area, but we made do with John, my John, patient John, leading the way, taking my cock in his hand and giving it experimental strokes that were oh so blissful, and me following suit with his cock, thicker, shorter, beautiful.
It was quick and messy, and we laughed afterwards: him calling me a sod, me calling him an idiot, him calling me his love, me calling him my light. We slept in the same bed, wrapped in each other’s arms.
And now he’s waking up. His eyes are luminous, his smile bright, and our future is blindingly unexpected. For once, I don't know and I do not need to know what comes next. He is here. That is enough.
I say, “John, the game is on.”
And he hears: John, stay with me forever.
Perhaps that is what I have been trying to tell him for years.
And when he says yes, I hear it all.