A Rather Simple Matter
Title: A Rather Simple Matter
Author: bluepercy
Word Count: 2620
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Sex. And lots of talking during sex. Deduction during sex. Uh.
A/N: I… am not really sure what to say about this. This is the only time in my life I’ve ever written smut and then actually showed it to people.
A Rather Simple Matter
The landlord looked suddenly very nervous and awkward.
“I’m afraid, sir, that the only room we have available at the moment has only one bed. It is a double bed, of course, but… I can ask if any of the other guests would be willing to trade rooms, but other than that faint hope I have nowhere to put you and the doctor.”
My companion dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “Tut, I don’t think we need to be putting anyone out. If that is all there is then we shall have to make do. Do not trouble yourself on our account, for I assure you that my friend and I have had to sleep in far less accommodating conditions.”
*
While I admit that under normal circumstances I would have been quite pleased about the indignity of being forced to share a bed with Sherlock Holmes, when he is on a case it’s a different matter. When faced with a worthy problem he will reach that pinnacle of intellectual thought which still, even now, astonishes me so, and simply ignore his body’s requirements for fear of distraction. While I do not ever regret forcing a small bit of food or drink into him when he is in this state, nor my occasional reminders that he really must have some sleep if he is to be of use to anybody, I have more sense than to insist upon the satiation of my own needs. He had never failed to make it up to me after the matter that was absorbing him was closed, and I had no real complaints. If we had been home I would simply have retreated to my own room until he was less preoccupied. I had no such option available to me now.
Still, there were two possibilities for this night. The first was that I would spend the night next to Holmes and maddeningly close to him but forbidden, by our unspoken agreement, to distract him with my touches. The second possibility, which to my dismay I felt was more likely, was that the matter we had come out to the country to investigate had interested him to the point that he had already decided to forgo sleep that night, in which case I would be alone in the bed while he mused on the problem until the sun rose.
He is Sherlock Holmes, of course, and there are none like him. I cannot really fault him for being who he is, not when I love him so for it.
I retired to the room first, while Holmes excused himself, saying he had to make a quick jaunt down the road. I was quite exhausted, having had both a long journey from London and several hours of vigorous exercise following Holmes about the estate and subsequently about town. I was in bed directly, and staring at the ceiling trying to calm my mind, when Holmes returned.
“Watson,” he greeted me, and set about preparing for bed without another word.
The light from the tallow candle upon the table, and from the evening sky through the crack in the shutters, fell upon him as he undressed, upon his narrow shoulders, giving his skin a strange golden sheen to it. I could count the muscles in his back, name them as they moved under his skin, and I wanted dearly to trace my fingers over them, feel them flex and shiver under my touch.
Abruptly, I discovered that I had better stop watching before I lost all semblance of self-control. I rolled over in the bed, facing away from Holmes, my eyes squeezed shut as I tried in vain to think of anything other than him.
“Now, if we must suffer the indignity of sharing a bed,” Holmes said suddenly, pulling back the covers, “I suppose that we must make the best of it.” He blew out the candle and curled up close behind me, his arms snaking around my waist. He had also, I realised quickly, apparently chosen to leave off his nightshirt and had crawled in with me stark naked. I admit I stiffened a little, mostly in surprise, and his grasp loosened immediately. “My dear Watson, you’re not irritated with me for some reason?” His tone was jocular, but when, with a gentle touch under my chin, he drew my face upwards to look at him, there was a faint worry in his grey eyes.
“Of course I am not angry,” I reassured him, turning over onto my back.
“No, no of course you are not,” Holmes murmured, looking at me carefully. He smiled, briefly. “Except I was still endeavouring to capture your attention and you most pointedly looked away.”
“You were trying--!” I sputtered in disbelief, and then laughed. “Holmes, really. I assumed that with your mind on the case-”
“The case,” he scoffed, and curled himself around me, the fingers of his left hand entwined into my hair while his right hand finally dropped from the underside of my chin to my throat. “This case is a waste of my time and yours, Watson. It is solved, as far as I am concerned, and I am only waiting for an answer to the telegram I just sent to London to be absolutely certain of the facts.”
“You’ve solved it?” I was incredulous. I could hardly see how such a peculiar set of circumstances had been so obvious to him. “How could you possibly have solved it already?”
“It is a trifling matter, Watson.” He exhaled loudly, profoundly irritated. “If the local constabulary would but use their eyes they would have solved it themselves, but no! I must come out here and point out the obvious for them. I wish to wash my hands of this entire affair and return home.”
He was so petulant in his disappointment, like a child; I laid a hand over his where it rested upon my throat. “I admit that it is all quite beyond me, Holmes.”
His eyes flashed. “You underestimate yourself again, Watson.” Holmes ran a thumb over my brow. “You have seen everything, you would know the answer if you let yourself, but once again you will not trust your judgement or your deductions.”
It was with more than a touch of bitterness when I spoke, turning slightly away from him. “Holmes, I am not you. I dearly wish I could apply your methods as well as you can, but I cannot. You cannot expect me to.”
“You have not tried,” he protested.
“I have been trying,” I insisted, “since we got here to see any light at all in this case, and it is no less dark than when it was described to us in Baker Street. In fact, it is considerably more obscure now that I know more of it. I cannot see what you do, and I am tired, and I think I would just like to sleep.”
There was a pause, and then Holmes’s fingers curled against my scalp and he bent to kiss me fondly. “Watson.”
“What is it?” I mumbled.
“Did you observe Lord Bertram’s boots?”
I grumbled and attempted to burrow down further into the bed. “No. No, not particularly. I saw nothing out of the ordinary about them. I suppose you are going to tell me now that I missed some vital clue that everything hinged upon. I am a stupid man, I know. If I could sleep-”
“Watson, please.” Something in his tone made me look at him, sitting up in the bed over me, naked in the dark. “You are not stupid and I will not listen to you discredit yourself in this way.” He dipped his head again and kissed me. “Lord Bertram’s boots, Watson.”
His tone was insistent, eager. I sighed. “What about them, Holmes?”
“They retained barely-dried mud in the cracks of the leather and on the laces. They had been very muddy, very recently, and cleaned since but not very well at all.”
I was silent a moment. “Why the deuce wouldn’t he have had his boots cleaned properly?” I asked, knowing as I said it that Holmes had already drawn me into his game and that I was lost to it, whatever I may have intended. His hand crept up the back of my nightshirt, and I inhaled sharply.
“Remember, also, that there has been no rain here in a week and a half,” Holmes reminded me. Indeed, I remembered his asking casually about the recent weather, though why I had not known at the time. His eyes were shining merrily.
“Then where would he have got his boots so muddy?” I wondered aloud, trying to think through the distraction his fingers were wreaking upon my flesh, and then continued in a rush, “He was down by the creek, of course, where the body was found. It’s all mud down there. Holmes, you can’t really suspect Lord Bertram.”
“I can and I do.” His hand slipped down my stomach to my groin and I let out a cry, or at least I began to let out a cry before Holmes clapped his other hand over my mouth. “Careful, my dear. Do remember we’re not at home.”
“If you would only stop,” I began, breathlessly.
“You cannot expect me to keep my hands off you when you are being so brilliant.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“Oh, I’m not.” He buried his mouth in my neck, hot and wet and wonderful. I admit I gasped.
For a moment we lay like that, tangled together, while he stroked and kissed me and thwarted any attempts I might make to turn and meet him as enthusiastically as I might wish to. In the dim light from the window, I saw his hand rest, briefly, upon my ribs like an enormous white spider, all elegant lines and graceful long appendages. The sight triggered something within my brain, and for a short time I warred with allowing the thought and denying it so as not to interrupt the moment.
I could not leave it. “He couldn’t have!” With a sudden motion I jerked up in the bed, staring at Holmes, who had fixed me with a most peculiar gaze. “Holmes, Lord Bertram couldn’t have killed Hunter.”
“And why do you say that?” He propped himself up on one elbow, lifting his chin with a small challenge.
“His hands,” I pressed, even as he took me by the collar of my nightshirt and attempted to pull me down to him. “Holmes, Lord Bertram has severe arthritis in his hands, if ever I saw such a thing, and Hunter was strangled. He couldn’t have done it.”
Holmes smiled at me, as a cat must smile at a mouse, and I realised with a start that he had noticed Lord Bertram’s hands as well, and had been waiting for me to make the connection. “And you have so thoroughly dismissed the notion that he may have strangled Hunter with something other than his bare hands?”
“I saw the bruising as well as you did.”
His eyes were alight with high emotion when he spoke. “And we know that he must have been down by the creek on his property, yet he maintains that he never was until after the gardener found the body. We know the murderer made a point of smoothing out the mud around the body to hide his own tracks. Lord Bertram’s boot-marks are clearly not in the mess of prints around poor Hunter, so the mud is not from when he rushed down to the water in alarm. Clearly, he kept his distance and remained unmuddied.”
“Then how-” Abruptly it came to me, in a flash of insight; a satisfied, prideful grin spread across Holmes’s face when he saw it upon my face. “He had an accomplice.”
“All the best men have accomplices,” he murmured, and at last succeeded in kissing me, his lips surprisingly hot upon mine. I moaned into his mouth when he let his fingers stray down my back and into that most private of places.
He had somehow managed to slip out from underneath me, and he was curved over my back, his mouth trailing down my flesh, following the gentle press of his fingers. There was nothing but him, nothing but that touch upon my body and the mattress beneath me; I could believe the entire world vanished but for us, in that moment. Holmes is a man who, over all else, is inexorable in all that he does, and to have him as a lover is to be overwhelmed.
“Do you care to theorize upon the identity of his accomplice?” Holmes asked me suddenly, and I groaned.
“How you expect me to think when you are doing that…”
“Very well, I will cease if that is what you wish.”
“It is not what I wish, in fact.”
He chuckled. “The accomplice, Watson.”
I struggled to think; whatever game he was playing with me I knew that he would ultimately win, but that did not, and never would, stop me from being swept up in it. My brain warred with my body, and for some time I was sure my body would win, subjected as I was to Holmes’s masterful touch. “Smythe,” I gasped out.
“The butler? Tut, Watson, you are guessing.” His voice was low and husky. “If Smythe were involved then there would be no reason for Lord Bertram to have so neglected his boots, as Smythe would have done it for him. No, try again.”
“Holmes!” I pleaded.
“Try again, Watson.” He was implacable. His mouth was just behind my ear.
I shut my eyes, desperate to come to any sort of conclusion. “You don’t mean James, do you? That he would help his father in this? Holmes, he plans on joining the clergy!”
“I see no reason,” there was a definite growl in his voice now, predatory and irresistible, “that his future career should serve as an alibi.” His slick fingers pressed inside me, and I managed to muffle my cry with some small difficulty. “Go on, Watson.”
I groaned fully. “He is the only one besides Smythe who possesses the strength in his hands,” I said, with no small amount of difficulty. “And he… my God, Holmes… he…”
“Yes?” Holmes prompted. He did not stop what he was doing.
“He didn’t approve of Hunter’s… please… Hunter’s attentions to his sister, did he?” The only answer I received was a rather laboured grunt; it seemed encouraging and I took it as such. “And neither did… neither did Lord Bertram… good God.”
“Brilliant, Watson,” he said, his lips against my ear, his cool hand against my hot neck, and he thrust within me, at long last, and no more did he say for some time. The thought came to my mind that his need was intense, surprisingly so when he had done nothing but touch me and speak of the case, and then this thought was gone, lost with all semblance of consciousness as his ministrations continued. He spent himself within me, and I followed him gladly into the little death.
*
“So I was correct?” I asked, when we had recovered somewhat.
“In every degree.” Holmes lay curled over me with limbs askew, boneless and sated, with one hand resting possessively upon my clavicle. He sighed, as though he wanted to say more, but was too limp to summon the effort for any such thing. Admittedly, I felt the same way.
“I suppose it is rather simple.”
He did not answer me; he had fallen asleep. I soon followed his lead, as I do in so many things.
Author: bluepercy
Word Count: 2620
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Sex. And lots of talking during sex. Deduction during sex. Uh.
A/N: I… am not really sure what to say about this. This is the only time in my life I’ve ever written smut and then actually showed it to people.
A Rather Simple Matter
The landlord looked suddenly very nervous and awkward.
“I’m afraid, sir, that the only room we have available at the moment has only one bed. It is a double bed, of course, but… I can ask if any of the other guests would be willing to trade rooms, but other than that faint hope I have nowhere to put you and the doctor.”
My companion dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “Tut, I don’t think we need to be putting anyone out. If that is all there is then we shall have to make do. Do not trouble yourself on our account, for I assure you that my friend and I have had to sleep in far less accommodating conditions.”
*
While I admit that under normal circumstances I would have been quite pleased about the indignity of being forced to share a bed with Sherlock Holmes, when he is on a case it’s a different matter. When faced with a worthy problem he will reach that pinnacle of intellectual thought which still, even now, astonishes me so, and simply ignore his body’s requirements for fear of distraction. While I do not ever regret forcing a small bit of food or drink into him when he is in this state, nor my occasional reminders that he really must have some sleep if he is to be of use to anybody, I have more sense than to insist upon the satiation of my own needs. He had never failed to make it up to me after the matter that was absorbing him was closed, and I had no real complaints. If we had been home I would simply have retreated to my own room until he was less preoccupied. I had no such option available to me now.
Still, there were two possibilities for this night. The first was that I would spend the night next to Holmes and maddeningly close to him but forbidden, by our unspoken agreement, to distract him with my touches. The second possibility, which to my dismay I felt was more likely, was that the matter we had come out to the country to investigate had interested him to the point that he had already decided to forgo sleep that night, in which case I would be alone in the bed while he mused on the problem until the sun rose.
He is Sherlock Holmes, of course, and there are none like him. I cannot really fault him for being who he is, not when I love him so for it.
I retired to the room first, while Holmes excused himself, saying he had to make a quick jaunt down the road. I was quite exhausted, having had both a long journey from London and several hours of vigorous exercise following Holmes about the estate and subsequently about town. I was in bed directly, and staring at the ceiling trying to calm my mind, when Holmes returned.
“Watson,” he greeted me, and set about preparing for bed without another word.
The light from the tallow candle upon the table, and from the evening sky through the crack in the shutters, fell upon him as he undressed, upon his narrow shoulders, giving his skin a strange golden sheen to it. I could count the muscles in his back, name them as they moved under his skin, and I wanted dearly to trace my fingers over them, feel them flex and shiver under my touch.
Abruptly, I discovered that I had better stop watching before I lost all semblance of self-control. I rolled over in the bed, facing away from Holmes, my eyes squeezed shut as I tried in vain to think of anything other than him.
“Now, if we must suffer the indignity of sharing a bed,” Holmes said suddenly, pulling back the covers, “I suppose that we must make the best of it.” He blew out the candle and curled up close behind me, his arms snaking around my waist. He had also, I realised quickly, apparently chosen to leave off his nightshirt and had crawled in with me stark naked. I admit I stiffened a little, mostly in surprise, and his grasp loosened immediately. “My dear Watson, you’re not irritated with me for some reason?” His tone was jocular, but when, with a gentle touch under my chin, he drew my face upwards to look at him, there was a faint worry in his grey eyes.
“Of course I am not angry,” I reassured him, turning over onto my back.
“No, no of course you are not,” Holmes murmured, looking at me carefully. He smiled, briefly. “Except I was still endeavouring to capture your attention and you most pointedly looked away.”
“You were trying--!” I sputtered in disbelief, and then laughed. “Holmes, really. I assumed that with your mind on the case-”
“The case,” he scoffed, and curled himself around me, the fingers of his left hand entwined into my hair while his right hand finally dropped from the underside of my chin to my throat. “This case is a waste of my time and yours, Watson. It is solved, as far as I am concerned, and I am only waiting for an answer to the telegram I just sent to London to be absolutely certain of the facts.”
“You’ve solved it?” I was incredulous. I could hardly see how such a peculiar set of circumstances had been so obvious to him. “How could you possibly have solved it already?”
“It is a trifling matter, Watson.” He exhaled loudly, profoundly irritated. “If the local constabulary would but use their eyes they would have solved it themselves, but no! I must come out here and point out the obvious for them. I wish to wash my hands of this entire affair and return home.”
He was so petulant in his disappointment, like a child; I laid a hand over his where it rested upon my throat. “I admit that it is all quite beyond me, Holmes.”
His eyes flashed. “You underestimate yourself again, Watson.” Holmes ran a thumb over my brow. “You have seen everything, you would know the answer if you let yourself, but once again you will not trust your judgement or your deductions.”
It was with more than a touch of bitterness when I spoke, turning slightly away from him. “Holmes, I am not you. I dearly wish I could apply your methods as well as you can, but I cannot. You cannot expect me to.”
“You have not tried,” he protested.
“I have been trying,” I insisted, “since we got here to see any light at all in this case, and it is no less dark than when it was described to us in Baker Street. In fact, it is considerably more obscure now that I know more of it. I cannot see what you do, and I am tired, and I think I would just like to sleep.”
There was a pause, and then Holmes’s fingers curled against my scalp and he bent to kiss me fondly. “Watson.”
“What is it?” I mumbled.
“Did you observe Lord Bertram’s boots?”
I grumbled and attempted to burrow down further into the bed. “No. No, not particularly. I saw nothing out of the ordinary about them. I suppose you are going to tell me now that I missed some vital clue that everything hinged upon. I am a stupid man, I know. If I could sleep-”
“Watson, please.” Something in his tone made me look at him, sitting up in the bed over me, naked in the dark. “You are not stupid and I will not listen to you discredit yourself in this way.” He dipped his head again and kissed me. “Lord Bertram’s boots, Watson.”
His tone was insistent, eager. I sighed. “What about them, Holmes?”
“They retained barely-dried mud in the cracks of the leather and on the laces. They had been very muddy, very recently, and cleaned since but not very well at all.”
I was silent a moment. “Why the deuce wouldn’t he have had his boots cleaned properly?” I asked, knowing as I said it that Holmes had already drawn me into his game and that I was lost to it, whatever I may have intended. His hand crept up the back of my nightshirt, and I inhaled sharply.
“Remember, also, that there has been no rain here in a week and a half,” Holmes reminded me. Indeed, I remembered his asking casually about the recent weather, though why I had not known at the time. His eyes were shining merrily.
“Then where would he have got his boots so muddy?” I wondered aloud, trying to think through the distraction his fingers were wreaking upon my flesh, and then continued in a rush, “He was down by the creek, of course, where the body was found. It’s all mud down there. Holmes, you can’t really suspect Lord Bertram.”
“I can and I do.” His hand slipped down my stomach to my groin and I let out a cry, or at least I began to let out a cry before Holmes clapped his other hand over my mouth. “Careful, my dear. Do remember we’re not at home.”
“If you would only stop,” I began, breathlessly.
“You cannot expect me to keep my hands off you when you are being so brilliant.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“Oh, I’m not.” He buried his mouth in my neck, hot and wet and wonderful. I admit I gasped.
For a moment we lay like that, tangled together, while he stroked and kissed me and thwarted any attempts I might make to turn and meet him as enthusiastically as I might wish to. In the dim light from the window, I saw his hand rest, briefly, upon my ribs like an enormous white spider, all elegant lines and graceful long appendages. The sight triggered something within my brain, and for a short time I warred with allowing the thought and denying it so as not to interrupt the moment.
I could not leave it. “He couldn’t have!” With a sudden motion I jerked up in the bed, staring at Holmes, who had fixed me with a most peculiar gaze. “Holmes, Lord Bertram couldn’t have killed Hunter.”
“And why do you say that?” He propped himself up on one elbow, lifting his chin with a small challenge.
“His hands,” I pressed, even as he took me by the collar of my nightshirt and attempted to pull me down to him. “Holmes, Lord Bertram has severe arthritis in his hands, if ever I saw such a thing, and Hunter was strangled. He couldn’t have done it.”
Holmes smiled at me, as a cat must smile at a mouse, and I realised with a start that he had noticed Lord Bertram’s hands as well, and had been waiting for me to make the connection. “And you have so thoroughly dismissed the notion that he may have strangled Hunter with something other than his bare hands?”
“I saw the bruising as well as you did.”
His eyes were alight with high emotion when he spoke. “And we know that he must have been down by the creek on his property, yet he maintains that he never was until after the gardener found the body. We know the murderer made a point of smoothing out the mud around the body to hide his own tracks. Lord Bertram’s boot-marks are clearly not in the mess of prints around poor Hunter, so the mud is not from when he rushed down to the water in alarm. Clearly, he kept his distance and remained unmuddied.”
“Then how-” Abruptly it came to me, in a flash of insight; a satisfied, prideful grin spread across Holmes’s face when he saw it upon my face. “He had an accomplice.”
“All the best men have accomplices,” he murmured, and at last succeeded in kissing me, his lips surprisingly hot upon mine. I moaned into his mouth when he let his fingers stray down my back and into that most private of places.
He had somehow managed to slip out from underneath me, and he was curved over my back, his mouth trailing down my flesh, following the gentle press of his fingers. There was nothing but him, nothing but that touch upon my body and the mattress beneath me; I could believe the entire world vanished but for us, in that moment. Holmes is a man who, over all else, is inexorable in all that he does, and to have him as a lover is to be overwhelmed.
“Do you care to theorize upon the identity of his accomplice?” Holmes asked me suddenly, and I groaned.
“How you expect me to think when you are doing that…”
“Very well, I will cease if that is what you wish.”
“It is not what I wish, in fact.”
He chuckled. “The accomplice, Watson.”
I struggled to think; whatever game he was playing with me I knew that he would ultimately win, but that did not, and never would, stop me from being swept up in it. My brain warred with my body, and for some time I was sure my body would win, subjected as I was to Holmes’s masterful touch. “Smythe,” I gasped out.
“The butler? Tut, Watson, you are guessing.” His voice was low and husky. “If Smythe were involved then there would be no reason for Lord Bertram to have so neglected his boots, as Smythe would have done it for him. No, try again.”
“Holmes!” I pleaded.
“Try again, Watson.” He was implacable. His mouth was just behind my ear.
I shut my eyes, desperate to come to any sort of conclusion. “You don’t mean James, do you? That he would help his father in this? Holmes, he plans on joining the clergy!”
“I see no reason,” there was a definite growl in his voice now, predatory and irresistible, “that his future career should serve as an alibi.” His slick fingers pressed inside me, and I managed to muffle my cry with some small difficulty. “Go on, Watson.”
I groaned fully. “He is the only one besides Smythe who possesses the strength in his hands,” I said, with no small amount of difficulty. “And he… my God, Holmes… he…”
“Yes?” Holmes prompted. He did not stop what he was doing.
“He didn’t approve of Hunter’s… please… Hunter’s attentions to his sister, did he?” The only answer I received was a rather laboured grunt; it seemed encouraging and I took it as such. “And neither did… neither did Lord Bertram… good God.”
“Brilliant, Watson,” he said, his lips against my ear, his cool hand against my hot neck, and he thrust within me, at long last, and no more did he say for some time. The thought came to my mind that his need was intense, surprisingly so when he had done nothing but touch me and speak of the case, and then this thought was gone, lost with all semblance of consciousness as his ministrations continued. He spent himself within me, and I followed him gladly into the little death.
*
“So I was correct?” I asked, when we had recovered somewhat.
“In every degree.” Holmes lay curled over me with limbs askew, boneless and sated, with one hand resting possessively upon my clavicle. He sighed, as though he wanted to say more, but was too limp to summon the effort for any such thing. Admittedly, I felt the same way.
“I suppose it is rather simple.”
He did not answer me; he had fallen asleep. I soon followed his lead, as I do in so many things.