Work Text:
Two creamy hillocks, dusted with pale downy hair and lit by the sun.
No, no, too purple, he’d find it and laugh. And he will find it, make no mistake.
Write anyway.
Lush as a verdant field, touched with dew and shining.
Makes it seem as if he’s a meadow to be ploughed. Which he is. And he likes it so bloody much, writhing and gasping and begging, the dirty bugger. But pointing it out would be dickish — keep all dickishness under wraps as much as possible.
Pert flesh fills my palms and trembles to be parted.
Too obvious. You’re not writing a bloody romance novel over here, Watson, get a grip. On your cock. Fuck, now I need a wank.
Should take the edge off, yeah? Clear the mind.
—
Perhaps more success might be found in making it more him. Fancies himself a scientist and all. Has a first in Chemistry floating around somewhere in here. Probably crumpled up somewhere with some poo on to make Mycroft’s stiff upper lip tremble.
Science. Arse. Round science arse. Science arsehole. Licking the scientific arsehole of a scientific arsehole whose scientific arsehole arse has lodged itself in my heart. Mouth. My heart’s mouth.
Strike that. How does one reconcile sentiment and logic? By marrying sentiment to logic. Like Scotland and France.
Curves. Found in his pants. Also found in nature.
Nix all mention of sine and cosine functions — arse is not a parabola. Would be considerably less enthralled if it were. Well. Perhaps not put off entirely. Suspect the sight of him could get the blood up even if he were Sasquatch. Still. Metaphors must be apt, must ignite the desire to feel the words on the tongue, must inspire the mouth to mould itself around the lines, must blur language and anatomy as if to speak is to lick, to kiss, to love.
Sound waves as associated with an arse probably not the most appropriate or flattering metaphor. Remove sound from the list of senses to evoke.
Light? How light refracts with the horizon as the world rotates? How light bends and trickles and exposes? Light — all the colours and none. Light — life-giving and skin-warming and shadow-throwing. Light — what he is to me.
We measure the brightness of stellar bodies
by how their light curves round the universe,
by how it winks when it reaches us,
and with its last embers
gives us each other.
Tear it, tear it into tiny little pieces so he’ll never find it.
—
He is so pushy after a case. Not that I mind. Will take a blow-job, thank you, will bestow much attention to a needful arse in return, you’re welcome. Not fussed at all.
He crashes, after, because he allows himself that when he is happy, and he is happiest with an arse full of spunk, happiest to force me to wipe him off while he is floppy with sleep and satiation. He is lovely like this, on his stomach with his face mashed into the pillows and not a single wound. He is lovely with the white line of his back interrupted here and there with beauty marks. He is lovely with the two moonlight swells of his arse peeking out from beneath the sheet, shiny in the monochrome of a room steeped in twilight.
He can sleep for England like this. Come hell or high water, he will sleep. There — it snores. Officially safe for the pen and notebook.
Ink does blot so when you tap it on the page. Sometimes a doodle helps the words come. Doodle a bum in the corner. Another in the other corner. A whole line of bums down the margin. Cock. Arc of come.
Sigh.
Lean over and press mouth to the fullest bit of each cheek. For inspiration. Breathe deep of the dear little hollows at the base of his spine, where he smells of sex and sweat and himself and me. Pet the pale downy hairs, invisible but sweet, raise the gooseflesh on him, watch him stir enough to arch into the touch. Part him a bit, just a little, just enough to see the damp wink of his arsehole, the come that defied the rag earlier. Lick a long stripe up the perineum — to clean him, to make sure he’s tended to, to make sure he won’t be uncomfortable when he wakes in an empty bed fourteen hours from now.
Where are the words for this? Where is the well of definition we can go to when we have such need for articulation?
These are the words for brilliant, like the light, like his mind, like the fire in my gut when he turns his eyes to mine: incandescent, luminous, effulgent, lambent, radiant.
These are words for the beat of my heart and the rush of my blood: pulse, swell, throb, thrum, thunder.
These are the words for what it is to drive into him, to spill of myself into the deepest parts of him and hear him moan for more: rapture, fervour, reverence, ecstasy, zeal.
Save them. Save them for when they might fit just so in a line, for when no other word will do.
Ignore the way he whimpers and write, now, JOHN and WATSON on the swells of his arse.
—
Speak his language.
Like a brain floating in formaldehyde—
No.
Fine handfuls of flesh, firm as rigour mortis.
Oh that is hideous.
You are the cipher as well as its key.
Christ.
This is just the wrong approach. His language is not the kind of language one uses to express beauty, or even a basic thought not predicated on the knowledge of a thousand previous conversations as well as general esoterica — look at his blog. Three hits in the last five days, the daft bugger, and he can’t figure out why.
It’s part of his charm. The pinch of his brow, the pout of his lips. He’s quite delectable like that, though often infuriating.
Sod his language. His language has never mustered the bollocks to arrange itself into a declaration of his devotion and affection. But I know it’s there. By the grip of his hands around my triceps, by the swipe of his tongue in my mouth, by the imploring of his mercury eyes. By his smile. By how gentle he can be. By the way he tries.
I do know.
—
I think I’ve got the secret to capturing this, now.
Earlier:
He can be so squirmy.
“John. John. John.”
“What, Sherlock? I’m trying to read.”
“I’m stiff,” he said. “I need a massage,” he said. And then he made big eyes at me and quirked his body askew.
Oh, Lord.
“What is that? Are you— are you trying to look cute?”
“John.” A scowl, the tender pink of the inside of his bottom lip.
I do so like to tease him. “Do you actually need a massage, or are you angling to get fingered right now?”
Aghast, offence, scandal! A hand splayed over his heart.
“How dare you! I’ve a strained muscle!”
I put down the paper, slapped my knees and stood. “Right then. Off to the bedroom with you, and get your kit off.”
He stalked into the bedroom, imperious with his dressing gown wrapped tight around his body, nose in the air as if getting taller than he already is would give him something over me.
He was naked and prone and his arse was pert and beckoning. I settled over his thighs and placed my hands on his iliac crests.
“All right?”
A grunt.
Thumbs on either side of his tail bone. There — knots. Dug in. Elicited a deeply satisfied moan. I lingered there until he’d loosened. Pushed the heels of my hands over his thoracolumbar fascia. He rumbled into the pillow.
Sucked on the skin between his shoulder blades — he likes that, always. Arched like a cat.
“Tell me,” he said, gasping.
“I thought you needed a massage.”
“Both!”
“Greedy.” Scraped teeth along levator scapulae and he mewled and wriggled into the mattress.
“John.”
“Sternocleidomastoid,” I said, sucking kisses into the side of his neck. He pushed that lush arse into my pelvis, but I like to take my time. I worshiped every bit of skin. I named every muscle. I reduced him to a quivering mess of sensation. “Splenius capitis. Splenius cervicis. Trapezius. Rhomboideus minor. Supraspinatus. Infraspinatus fascia. Rhomboideus major. Teres minor. Teres major. Latissmus dorsi. Serratus anterior. Erector spine. Serratus posterior. Thoracolumbar fascia. External abdominal oblique. Internal abdominal oblique.” When he was mindless, rutting, bollocks flushed and swollen, squashed against the bedding, I laid my hands on his neediest bit and spread him apart. “Gluteus medius,” I whispered against the skin. “Gluteus maximus. Semitendinous. Adductor magnus.”
“John! Please!”
“Perineum,” I said, and licked up the length of it. He bellowed and thrashed, as if unable to decide whether he wanted to fuck his cock into the mattress or push his hole against my mouth. I held him steady by his lovely iliac crests. I nosed into his tailbone and sucked firmly on his hole before pushing inside with my tongue. He reached back to twist his fingers into my hair, to push me further into him. I squeezed his pretty arse and obliged.
He can come like that, and he did. He was worked up, and it didn’t take him long to stiffen and convulse with a strangled gasp. Didn’t take me long afterward to paint his arsehole with my own come and clean it up with my tongue. I lay for a while with my face mashed against that perfect arse and I had a moment, where everything was clear and cool and rang like crystal, where I could see the dust motes floating in the pale shafts of the afternoon sun, and I could hear both our heartbeats. I wanted to preserve it as if in clear amber, he and I together and sated and happy. Moments of actual perfection are so fleeting — and they should be, or we wouldn’t know what they were, what they meant. But can they be captured? Can I convey what it is to be with him in these moments of satiated peace, where I am bigger than I’ve ever been because I am swollen with love?
I am not up to the task, I think. I’m not a good poet. I know that. I can barely get through a blog post without some failure of articulation or offensive floridity of expression. How can one read Yeats and Auden and Hopkins and Morgan and Cummings and think oneself worthy to approach their shadows?
But I do anyway. I do it anyway. That is what intimacy is, I am realising: the alchemy of two people resulting in the act of creation. He makes me better. He makes me write down all the words. He makes me try to get them in the right order. He makes me believe I can put to page what we are. He makes me want to keep trying.
He pulled me up against him afterward, kissed me long and slow, tasting of himself and me on the slick of my tongue. He kissed both my eyes and the tip of my nose and turned me on my side so he could mould himself flush against my back and close his mouth around the top of my ear.
“You’re better than three severed fingers in the mail,” he told me, and cupped his hand round the soft bit at my navel. “You’re better than a locked-box murder in a small town.”
I make him try too.
—
He finds my notebook, all the scratchings and failures and smears of ink native to any lefty’s longhand work. Of course he does. And I know he is amused, or scornful — he is not an appreciator of literature. He has a flawed understanding of what the truth is, and he believes fiction and poetry — storybooks and fairy stories, he calls them — cannot hope to tell it. To him, truth is mathematical fact and proof of who committed what crime. Truth is physical for him. I am foolish for believing this was something he could ever understand.
He doesn’t say anything when I come downstairs with a stone in my belly. He is at the window playing his violin, something I’ve never heard before, something sweet and full of a longing that makes me ache. He is as oblivious to me as ever, and a page flutters out of the notebook. I bend to pick it up.
I was not a man before I knew you. You are the best of me.
I tuck it back into my notebook. I sit down, and I listen, and I watch the grace of his body as he leans into the music.
End