Chapter Text
Sherlock, hands mantling John’s hips, whispered to the boom of his heart: slowly. Slowly.
Sherlock, already turned from thrill and chase towards the gentle and sedate, was getting a further lesson in deliberation, in intention, in delayed gratification. Even if it was almost against his will. It seemed he would never be finished with this particular lesson. People kept showing up in his life wanting to teach him its ways.
He was at turns grateful and indignant, patient and irritated; in general: a tumult.
“Steady on,” Sherlock said, his hands tightening on John’s hips, stabilizing him as the chair upon which John was standing, swiveled. “It’s not too late for me to fetch a kitchen chair, you know,” Sherlock suggested hopefully.
“One more tack and it’s done,” John muttered out the side of his mouth, said tack held between his pursed lips as he worked to untangle a fiddly knot in the string of multi-coloured Christmas lights he was adorning Sherlock’s sitting room window with while perched precariously on the seat of Sherlock’s rolling desk chair.
Sherlock looked up, into the tangle of rainbow hued lights and away from the strip of skin just above the waistband of John’s jeans, exposed by the hem of John’s Christmas jumper which had ridden up as he had to keep his arms lifted to complete the task at hand. That strip of skin made Sherlock feel funny, a little breathless, a little dizzy, a lot wanting . It had been three weeks of kissing since that first one. Three extraordinary weeks of kissing, don’t get him wrong, but at this point Sherlock’s mind was somewhat tiring of imagining what John looked like underneath all of his cozy knitwear and wanted to know, wanted to be in possession of all of the facts, as it were.
In fact, this barely there strip of skin— just a whisper, a mere suggestion, really— was wreaking havoc on Sherlock’s body, an erection making itself known in no uncertain terms against the fly of his jeans. He shifted his hips and moved his thighs, trying to adjust himself discreetly so that when John climbed down Sherlock’s desires weren’t making themselves quite so paramountly obvious.
But then John lurched a bit, freeing the knot with a sudden jerk, and the chair rolled back, sending John off balance and pitching forward, and so Sherlock caught him, naturally, hands wrapped around the backs of his thighs, face pressed to John’s stomach, startled breath skating along that damned stretch of skin, which had now become a small oasis sized patch complete with downy soft (as Sherlock’s cheek could now attest) happy trail cutting through.
“Bugger, bugger, bugger, fuck,” John was muttering, one hand holding Sherlock in place by the shoulder as he scooted the chair forward to regain his footing. “Almost there…”
Sherlock squeezed his eyes shut and counted to ten inside his head. John wanted to go slow. He (probably) wouldn’t appreciate Sherlock putting his hands and mouth all over him while he was simply trying to help Sherlock decorate for the holiday party Sherlock had agreed to host. Sherlock needed to get a grip and bloody well calm down. A bit of skin shouldn’t be enough to get him so worked up.
“Done!” John said triumphantly at last. “What do you think?”
Sherlock peeled his blushing cheek away from John’s stomach and looked up. He was too uncomfortable and embarrassed to really judge so he nodded and said, “Brilliant. Well done. Thank you.”
He made to step away, giving John room to climb down, but John stopped him, his other hand dropping down so that both were curved around Sherlock’s shoulders momentarily, then brushing up and over the collar of his dress shirt to curl around the back of his neck.
“Stay a moment, yeah? It’s not very often I’m the one looking down on you, mm?” John said, one hand tangling itself in Sherlock’s hair while he stroked a thumb over Sherlock’s cheek with the other.
Sherlock felt the fervent edge of his desire soften, melting into what he had come to identify over the last three weeks as a certain kind of lovelorn yearning, I love you, constantly on the tip of his tongue. Sometimes it was when John looked at him this way, warm with attraction, but sometimes it was when John had biscuit crumbs caught in his stubble as he animatedly recounted a funny incident at the surgery or the way he held Charlotte’s hand on a walk together through the Edicott’s woods to search for wild hives, or the way he had slumped against Sherlock’s side, head resting against Sherlock’s shoulder, on his sofa one evening last week, and promptly fell asleep as Sherlock described the most recent beekeepers association meeting, mug of tea somehow still balanced on his knee.
Slow, Sherlock told the thudding of his heart. Go slow.
“I like to look at you,” John murmured, the pad of his thumb sketching a line over the crest of Sherlock’s cheekbone. “You’re so lovely.”
Sherlock let his eyes flutter closed, I love you trapped against the back of his teeth, an ache lodged in his chest.
The hand in Sherlock’s hair tugged gently so that Sherlock tipped back, offering up the right side of his face to John’s lips, which skated down from his temple to where his jaw met his throat, feathering lightly over the lobe of his ear. Sherlock shivered, the ache splintering through him, his blood pounding down once more to lodge in his cock.
“You’re wearing the shirt you were wearing the first time Charlotte and I came over,” John said, as he kissed down Sherlock’s neck. “Do you remember?”
Sherlock absolutely had no idea what John was talking about and made a sound of negation in his throat.
“You were chopping wood as we came up the driveway. You had your shirt, this shirt, off.”
Sherlock, lost to the arousal flooding through him, made another unintelligible noise, this one meant to denote interest.
“You buttoned up as soon as you saw us, but I knew something was going on with me when that image of you—your chest gleaming with sweat and the hard muscles in your arms—showed up in my head the next time I was having a wank.”
This was new information. Sherlock stilled, waiting for John to go on.
“I’m been talking everything through with my therapist since then, and…” John trailed off, and Sherlock pulled back so that he could look into John’s eyes. “And I’ve got what she calls internalized homophobia. It’s sort of like this hateful judging voice in my head, sounds a lot like my dad, actually.”
Sherlock swallowed and said softly, ruefully, “Sounds like my own father then, as well.”
“She’s helping me reframe some knee jerk thoughts I’ve been having and it’s been working. I appreciate you being willing to take things slow, but I think…I think I’m ready…to move forward.”
Sherlock heard the hesitancy in John’s fits and starts. “There’s no rush,” he reassured him, wanting to give him room to navigate this at his own speed.
John shook his head, his eyes a very dark blue. “I’m sure. I want to be with you. I’ve been fantasizing about it for months.”
John’s knees loosened as he bent to take Sherlock’s lower lip between his own, his legs spreading to either side of Sherlock’s chest. Sherlock caught the backs of John’s thighs and lifted him, John’s tongue in Sherlock’s mouth, a low moan humming in the back of his throat.
Sherlock carried John the few steps over to his desk and set him down on top of it, crowding in close between John’s legs until they were pressed together once more. John gasped, “Fuck,” as the hard lines of their cocks met through their clothes. “Feel that? I want you really, really fucking bad, Sherlock. I hope this might allay any doubts on that front.” His hands roaming over Sherlock’s back, lower and lower, until he was cupping Sherlock’s arse and rocking him forward, rubbing them together, hard.
Sherlock wanted to lay John back, sod the things that might be crushed or crumpled, wanted to unbutton and unzip him, wanted to finally know the taste of him, wanted the whole throbbing length of him in his mouth.
Sherlock ran his tongue over the leaping pulse point below John’s jaw, sucked a tiny mark into the tender skin there. Blood rushed to the spot, momentarily darkening to puce, but dissipated slowly. John shuddered against him, “If my daughter wasn’t going to walk in at any minute I’d—”
“Yes?” Sherlock prompted eagerly, pulling back so that he could look John in the eye. John wasn’t the only one who wanted; for Sherlock, the last few weeks had been a kind of excruciating sensual torture, a brutal kind of edging, drawing things out until he was vibrating with need everytime they were together now. Just two nights past, after a particularly intense make-out session on John’s sofa, turned on to the point of having to get a hand on himself in his kitchen, physically unable to wait until he reached his bed, Sherlock had had to relieve himself then and there, braced against the sink, coming so hard he saw stars.
John licked his lips. “I was thinking we could start with hand jobs.”
And so Sherlock was left once more with a raging hard-on as a knock sounded on the front door, announcing the arrival of the Edicotts with Charlotte, who had accompanied them to the Christmas Market that morning, and the beginning of the party. “Soon,” John promised, wincing at the interruption. He kissed Sherlock one more time, before sliding off the desk and taking Sherlock’s hand. He brushed his lips across the back of it, desire still burning, dark and potent, in his eyes. “Very soon.”