Resurrection Man

1.

I finished the last of my coffee, wiped my mustache, and limply tossed my napkin into my plate with a sigh. It was the third morning in a row that I had breakfasted alone, a rare occurrence in our flat, and one which meant that something would have to be done. I rang and requested a pot of tea, then began to make a plate of buttered bread at the sideboard.

I knew when I accepted my husband's romantic proposal that I wasn't entering into quasi-marriage with a man of regular habits, hence the development of my three-breakfast intervention rule. One missed breakfast likely means he went to bed in the wee hours, having been up all night downstairs doing heaven-knows-what; two consecutive missed breakfasts is far less common and almost certainly related to his work, which forces him to keep irregular hours in and of itself; but a third consecutive missed breakfast is a rarity and, as such, an indication that something is amiss.

I knew what the problem was, of course; in some ways I know my husband better than he knows himself. I suppose it's that way with every couple. He has fallen into one of the black pits of despair which are liable to open beneath his feet after a stretch of too much boredom or inactivity. The longer he lays in bed, however, the deeper the despair becomes. When he stays down too long and the pit yawns too deeply, he needs my help to effect an escape and, due to an excess of brilliance and pride on his part, I have had to develop my own unique and rather unusual methods in order to assist him.

Fifteen minutes later I was carefully climbing the stairs, bearing a chattering tray upon which was arrayed an ad hoc breakfast of tea and bread with a pot of jam on the side, along with a clean ashtray, a bag of tobacco, and the favorite pipe, which for days had been sitting, unsmoked, beside the unoccupied favorite chair. Outside of his bedroom door I balanced the tray on one hand and knocked lightly with the other - a mere formality, since I knew that he wouldn't answer. I tried the knob and cursed him silently as I dug my keys from out of my pocket, fumbled through them single-handedly, and let myself into the room.

If not for the few locks of tousled dark hair protruding from beneath the blankets, the room would have looked unoccupied. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke and was its usual untidy mess. I picked my way through the dirty linens, newspapers, and piles of books which littered the floor to the mantelpiece, and with my free hand swept a swath through the detritus which littered its surface. Matches, coins, slips and wads of paper of every description, a police whistle, ticket stubs, half of a boot lace, a revolver - everything my husband dug out of his pockets while undressing ended up on the mantle, where I now managed to clear a spot for the tea tray.

I walked to the side of the bed and, as I was undressing, mentally prepared myself to perform the necessary treatment. It is admittedly a most unconventional therapy, one that I certainly didn't learn in any lecture hall during medical college, but it is an effective remedy for my most unconventional patient. I pulled up the corner of the blankets and gently slipped into my husband's bed. He was laying on his side, facing away from me, and I worked my way over to him, slipping my arm beneath his and curving myself around him. He felt thinner than usual in my arms, almost frail, and my heart swelled with love for him. I tenderly kissed the back of his neck.

"Sherlock..." I murmured. Aside from the rise and fall of his ribcage, he remained still, although I knew that he had been awake since I'd come clattering down the hallway with the china. I kissed him again, feeling the fine hairs at the nape of his neck tickle my lips. My mouth roved down to the nubs of his cervical spine, along his scapula to his acromion process, and up his trapezius muscle.

"Go away..." came Sherlock's muffled voice as he made a half-hearted attempt to shrug me off of his shoulder. Grousing was an encouraging sign, so I cautiously proceeded.

I had gradually been raising myself up onto my right elbow and dipped my head down to nip at the back of Sherlock's left ear. I slowly began inching my left hand up along his abdomen, loosening the arms crossed over his chest, patiently working him open like a clam.

"To the devil with London and all its criminals," I whispered, the flat of my hand now on his sternum. I could feel his heart beating beneath his warm, smooth skin and was suddenly, acutely aware of my hips pressing against Sherlock's slight but shapely backside. I forced my thoughts to remain on task. "That infernal tide will ebb and flow at our doorstep for the rest of our days, but I can't live without you." He stirred slightly but, when he resumed his stubborn stillness, I resorted to my strongest means of persuasion. "Get out of this bed and come back to me," I pleaded, and then launched my attack.

I began to kiss my way down Sherlock's angular jaw, nuzzling my face further down into the crook of his neck until my lips finally gained his throat, whereupon I placed a series of long, suckling kisses. His body stiffened; his head began to tip back, baring more and more of his long, slender neck to my persistent attention; he began to shift restlessly in my arms, making faint grunting noises deep in his throat that were as much an effort to suppress his pleasure as they were an expression of it. At last Sherlock gasped and collapsed back against me, and I quickly rolled on top of him, fastening my lips to the other side of his throat, now free to unleash the genuine passion that I had heretofore been carefully moderating.

I wonder what London's criminal underworld would make of the knowledge that the mighty Sherlock Holmes has his own Achilles's heel: he goes positively weak in the knees when nibbled on the ears and neck.

2.

The lovers in my life haven't been many: one woman in my younger days, when I still believed that sexual attraction was a matter of willpower and performance, and a handful of men since abandoning that delusion. The latter had been much like myself: hale and hearty military types with robust, muscular bodies, well-groomed moustaches, athletic pastimes, and other such trappings of that particular class. With them I had enjoyed something like a close but rather bland friendship which, as if by mere consequence, included more or less frequent episodes of intimate congress. It was all pleasurable and fine, and the relationships felt much more natural than they had with the woman, but they had been dull.

In the midst of it all was Afghanistan, my injury at Maiwand, my subsequent illness and return to England, and then...Sherlock. Or Holmes, as I knew him during the first phase of our relationship.

It wasn't exactly love at first sight when Stamford brought me to meet Sherlock at the hospital laboratory, but it was certainly immediate fascination. His accent, vocabulary, and sartorial tastes all spoke of a highly educated gentleman, but his mannerisms and general mien were markedly unique and full of contradiction: he had a reserved and watchful air, but a flair for the dramatic gesture; he was slender and feline, but his handshake was iron, the fine muscles of his forearm leaping to life beneath his smooth, alabaster skin. As we exchanged greetings his eyes, though of a rather lovely, stormy gray, unnerved me by seeming to bore effortlessly down into my very soul. And yet there was often an alluring and mischievous twinkle in them when he spoke, as if he and I already shared some humorous secret. Sherlock can really be quite charismatic in his own subtle way.

I will admit that there was a bit of lust at first sight, and this surprised me because Sherlock was hardly of my type. He was tall and skinny, with an ascetic, bookish look about him and an air of barely suppressed nervous energy. Thin though he may be, Sherlock has a very masculine physique in his own right, and the way that he had tightly cinched his lab smock high on his narrow hips emphasized the delicious contrast between his broad shoulders and tidy waist. When Sherlock bent over the laboratory bench for a sticking plaster, his trousers stretched appealingly across a small but muscular backside that caused me to muse about the tackle he might be carrying up front.

By the time Stamford and I left the hospital, I had pegged Sherlock for a decent and well-to-do madman, possibly supported by a patient and wealthy family living at a convenient distance somewhere off in the country. There was no wedding ring on his finger; I noticed that in the course of our introduction, which Sherlock would no doubt say was a sign of my instantaneous attraction to him. And he'd probably be correct, as he so often is.

By the time we had finished viewing the Baker Street flat the following day I had fallen madly, irrevocably in love with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and to this day I couldn't tell you precisely when or why it happened. It may well have had something to do with the incongruously boyish excitement with which he had walked about the furnished flat, daydreaming aloud about where he would put this or that, working me into his plans in a charmingly innocent way.

"And your desk - you certainly have one, Watson, with the medical man's need for continuous study - can be made to fit here," he said, spreading his long arms wide in front of one window and looking back over his shoulder at me with his saucy little half-grin. "Provided, of course, that you find both flat and flatmate amenable to your needs." It was as if he already knew he had won me over - although I doubt then that he knew to what degree.

That was probably the moment in which I was lost forever. Or perhaps claimed forever would be more accurate, since it seems to me now that I was only ever lost before Stamford found me and led me to Holmes.

Regardless of my attraction to him, however, Sherlock's own romantic preferences remained a mystery to me. There could be no doubt from his talk that he had no interest in women, but he evinced no physical interest in men, either. He would speak in passing as if he saw the possibility of taking a wife but, in spite of the hordes of eligible women who swept in and out of our flat on a regular basis - some of whom made what I felt were rather obvious efforts to interest him - he never showed more than professional curiosity about them. Eventually I came round to the belief that Sherlock was a natural celibate and, to my selfish way of thinking, this was at least better than a definite attraction to women. I still believe that this is essentially true of Sherlock, that he is a natural celibate and without preference for either men or women. He has simply developed, either naturally or by deliberate decision, a preference for me. "My Watson" became "My John" behind closed doors.

Sherlock made the disclosure in typically dramatic fashion - after the screams from his bedroom had brought me running in the middle of the night. Sherlock has never been a regular sleeper, but he was a sound one before Reichenbach Falls. When he came back from the dead after three years, as it were, he began to have nightmares about once a fortnight from which he would awaken convinced that he had actually died at the Falls with Moriarty. It would take me a minute or two to convince him otherwise, an extraordinary length of time for such a logic-driven man, and even longer to calm him.

On this particular night, after having been awakened by Sherlock's terrible cries, I had entered his bedroom to find him sitting up in bed, his night shirt and hair soaked with sweat, his eyes wild and staring. I stripped off the soiled shirt and dried him off with a towel from the wash stand as I began to soothe him - all of which was very routine and mundane, until he made his extraordinary confession.

"I didn't die at the Falls," Sherlock had said quietly. At first I thought he was merely confirming what I had been murmuring to him, but then he continued. "But I will die one day, Watson, and I don't want it to be w-without..."

Alerted by the unusually thick sound of his voice, I looked up to find Sherlock staring at me with a solemn, almost terrified expression on his gaunt face. "Without what, Holmes?" I asked gently. I was alarmed at his unusual display of emotion, but I was desperate to keep him calm, and so affected a casual air in spite of observing him closely.

Sherlock swallowed, opened his mouth and closed it again, then looked into my eyes with such naked vulnerability that I was suddenly, horribly convinced he was going to tell me he was dying of tuberculosis or something similar. I felt positively sick, and my medical objectivity failed me.

"Without what, Holmes?" I asked again, barely able to get the words out.

"Without...kissing you," Sherlock finally whispered.

I could have been knocked over with a feather. The first thing I felt was immense relief, followed by a wavering disbelief that bobbed atop an ocean of exhilaration. But I didn't have to ask Sherlock if he had been serious, for it was written all over his face as he waited, in obvious agony, for my response.

"So kiss me, then," I finally managed to say with a nervous little grin. My heart was racing so fast and so high in my throat that I was worried I might actually vomit from sheer joy.

"I don't know how..." Sherlock answered simply. And then I learned that not only was Sherlock still in possession of his virginity at the age of 36, but that his innocence was complete. Not so much as a kiss had he experienced from either woman or man.

I admit that I was a bit taken aback. Even though I had come to the conclusion that Sherlock simply lacked the passionate urges that bedeviled normal men, I had always assumed he'd determined this for himself after a period of experimentation - much like I had come to awareness of my own disinclination towards women. But this hadn't been the case, and thus I began to feel rather nervous myself.

I had never been anyone's first lover, nor did I particularly enjoy being the dominant or aggressive partner in an amorous encounter. It was a role I had rarely ever played. I began to feel like I was the proverbial blind leading the blind. What if I made a hash of it? And how would I know how far to take things? I remembered how finicky Sherlock could be about his hygiene and cleanliness, and subsequently began to worry that the inevitable messiness of physical congress would repulse him. But yet his angular face looked so handsome in the flickering candle light, and he was clad in naught but a pair of thin cotton drawers, and he was making himself available, and I wanted him suddenly worse than ever before. All of this flashed through my mind in mere seconds and led me to the conclusion that, as I'd decided so often during my military career, there was nothing else for it but to get stuck in, as it were. (I suppose the pun was intended.)

"Shall I give you a demonstration?" I asked, even managing a bit of coyness. Sherlock had gotten over his agony of doubt but remained noticeably uncomfortable, and, when he replied with a bashfully brief nod and grin, it suddenly dawned on me that I had finally stumbled upon a situation in which I had the upper hand on Sherlock. I was indubitably in control as I was the only one with prior experience. With that realization my confidence returned. Perhaps too much confidence, as it turned out.

3.

It is my opinion that people make overmuch of their first experience with physical intimacy; I'm personally convinced that virtually everyone's first time is their least spectacular, when viewed after years of repetition. Sherlock's was confusing and embarrassing for him and left me with half-shattered nerves for the whole of the following day. (He loves dramatics, as I have said.)

Things would have no doubt been less upsetting had Sherlock and I had two important pieces of related data, the first of which being that Sherlock really only enjoys certain specific ways of being touched; most others he dislikes, and some he cannot tolerate at all.

I had long noticed that Sherlock was particular about his skin and that he became visibly uncomfortable when touched by someone beyond the usual handshake or slap on the arm. He will also only wear one specific type and brand of cuff and collar, looks upon being barbered as most look upon a visit to the dentist, and removes the tags from any clothing likely to be in contact with his skin. All of these sorts of things I chalked up either to Sherlock's fastidious personal habits or his general eccentricity, but since we've begun to share intimate congress I have become all but certain that Sherlock suffers not from an excess of opinions, but rather from some very real but obscure physiological malady.

The first of the clues which ultimately led me to this conclusion was the fact that my poor beloved's first experience with physical intimacy caused him to temporarily lose consciousness. One moment he was gasping and writhing amongst the sheets, clearly on the very precipice of climax, and the next moment his eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp as a rag. It was one of the most shocking things that has ever happened to me, which my regular readers will appreciate for the strong statement that it is.

I thought he had gone apoplectic and died, and I was suddenly back on that cursed bridge at Maiwand; it wasn't Sherlock I was trying to slap and shake and shout back to life, it was Sergeant Troy, already dead from the gaping wound in his back which I had been unable to see. This temporary derangement lasted but a moment until my medical instincts took hold of me and I returned to my senses.

Sherlock was unconscious but his pulse was fast and bounding and he was still breathing at a rapid, shallow rate. His pupils were reactive. The rest of his body was utterly slack and still, aside from the faint muscular spasming of his stomach, remnants of the climax he would never remember. I hadn't been paying very close attention to minor details in the moment, but as I began to calm myself down I realized that Sherlock had spent all over his chest and stomach and that, in the course of frantically examining him for apoplexy and so forth, I had gotten the sticky stuff everywhere. And of course Sherlock came to before I could get him cleaned up and, after I explained what had happened and told him not to move, I had to listen to him gripe for fifteen minutes about how he couldn't understand why humanity has been raising such an almighty uproar for millennia over a "Ritual" (the capitalization was evident in his voice) with such an inconvenient, slimy, and rather disgusting result.

There was more, of course, but I was a bit annoyed over Sherlock's complaints of being slimy and so forth. After all, he had seemed to be equally repelled by the idea of spending in my mouth, and, had he not prevented himself from doing so only minutes before this disaster, it's possible that he wouldn't have lost consciousness and frightened me half to death. The solutions to all of our first-time woes actually lay within that incident, but they were solutions to problems that we didn't yet know that we had.

I alluded above to two points of data we lacked that combined to make the disaster I subsequently described, the first data of which was that Sherlock only enjoys being touched in certain ways. The way I've come to think of it is that he needs to be touched so that a) he knows I'm there, and b) knows what I'm doing. Gentle, feathery caresses, much like a nervous man would give his nervous and inexperienced lover, seem to make Sherlock anxious to the point of distraction - a reaction that was initially easily confused with first time nerves.

Which brings me to the second data point: Sherlock doesn't like having his penis fiddled with overmuch until he is ready to let himself be brought off. What he really enjoys is firm but indirect contact: rubbing himself against or between various parts of my body, or being rubbed by same. He can easily achieve satisfaction in this way with no more effort than other men expend during more conventional acts, and he'll do this through perhaps three-fourths of an amorous coupling before consenting to be brought off in the manner of my choosing. It's a rare point of compromise for Sherlock, and half of the time I compromise in turn by telling him to carry on with whatever he's doing. The other half of the time, however, I simply need his rather magnificent cock inside of me at one end or the other and there'll be no compromising about it. While Sherlock doesn't quite understand this need of mine, he does comply with such convincing enthusiasm that there can be no doubt that he is getting some degree of joy for his efforts.