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Every time I see you it gets a little worse;
Perhaps things are getting better, but how can one be so sure?
So I will take it slowly so that I can rest assured;
Wait until tomorrow goes away.
In the evening when I wake up I would love to hear you say:
"Ooh...wait until tomorrow goes away..."
"Tomorrow Goes Away" - Delta Spirit
Because my betrothed seems to believe that it's not enough for one of us to sit around scribbling about me, that almighty Posterity demands I give accounts of my career and even my personal life "in my own voice," here I am - after having spent two and a half hours first cleaning off the surface of my desk - putting pen to paper in order to make John happy. But I'll have you know that I'm doing so under duress, whomever you are, Faceless Denizen of the future.
John is on one of his campaigns again - actually presented me with an absurd list of queries to address along with the equally absurd accusation that I've been avoiding this supposed duty for over two years, driving home the final nail by reminding me that I have nothing better to do at present when the weather is so inclement. I glanced at the list and threw it straight into the fire, but my irritation only increased when I realized that John and I know each other far too well after all these years for him to be upset by my childish gesture; John knew that I had already memorized the list's important contents, and I knew that John would simply write me up another if I pretended that I hadn't, and that if I ignored the copy then copies of the copy would start appearing in every nook and cranny of my life: tucked under my tin of shaving lotion, slipped into the lining of my hat, replacing my bookmark - he can be quite relentless in his own quiet way, my betrothed. What he lacks in intellect he makes up for with persistence.
These are the depths of domesticity which I am currently plumbing, Faceless Denizen.
We have friends who come over for dinner and bring bottles of wine.
I'm watching his reflection now in the silver cigarette case which I placed upon the top of my desk for this precise reason; he has fallen asleep behind me on the sofa, book laying open on his chest, spectacles still on the end of his nose, mouth half open, and I find it almost impossible to be irritated with John when I see him asleep. He probably did this on purpose. He's crafty, my betrothed, much craftier than I had initially assumed…
Very well, then, Faceless Denizen - I will write, and I will follow the routine that John and I have established for these performances of my literary penance: when I have finished writing, I will slip these pages into a large envelope which John keeps in the lower lefthand drawer of his desk and, while I know that he does read them, I never know when. Certainly never in my presence.
I'm sure that in my dear, slumbering John's dreams I am sitting here composing, at very long last, my own complete account of the case of Vamberry, the wine merchant, or perhaps the long and horrific chain of events which led to the discovery of the giant rat of Sumatra, or maybe even some of the little problems brought to me from time to time by my peers at Cambridge, before I had become the man John met in the laboratory of St. Bartholomew's that New Year's day so many years ago.
Doesn't John know that there is only one mystery in my past which really holds any lasting interest for me? Let's give it one of John's romantic titles, shall we? "The Adventure of the Amorous Army Surgeon," perhaps. Why not give John a bit of a surprise…
There I was, having escaped my father and having outgrown Cambridge, just getting round to fully fledging myself as the world's first and only consulting detective, happily immersed in my experiments and research and agony columns, when into my quiet little life walked the man who would break it all asunder...Hmm, no, that's not accurate; after all, the aforementioned silver case is still three-quarters full of rather expensive Russian cigarettes, a carton of which I received as a gift for consulting on a case just last week, so John certainly didn't impede my career as I had feared he would, nor has he diminished my comfort (provided we keep to separate beds…most of the time).
Perhaps what John came in and broke was me, myself. Yes, that's more accurate. John broke me - but, like his friend and fellow sawbones, Atherton, likes to tell his patients as he's swaddling them with wet, slimy plaster, John rebuilt me stronger than I had ever been before.
Don't bother asking me what it was about John which allowed him to worm and wriggle his way into my heart - not to mention my bed - in such an extraordinary way. There's nothing particularly extraordinary about him. There he is, dozing on the sofa…Were one to ever seek the Platonic paradigm of ordinary British middle-class manhood, one would have to search no further than our parlor. You pass hundreds of John Watsons at a busy rail station, perhaps thousands of them in the streets every day, depending on your habits and mobility. And yet this particular John became my John, my one and only…But how?
I could throw you out any number of things I admire and appreciate about him, but that wouldn't be adequate. I admire John's honesty, for example, but I've known many other honest men without falling into bed with them. I appreciate John's limpid blue eyes and his easy smile, but his physical characteristics are perhaps the least significant reason that I developed such an affection for him.
Very well, but then which reasons were most significant?
This is the sort of thing I pondered for hours during the three years I spent hiding in a French laboratory, waiting for the demise of Moriarty's gang, and which nearly drove me mad. I've largely given up these questions as unanswerable.
I can, however, say with confidence that two essential characteristics which made possible our unlikely union were John's kindness and trustworthiness. While I know not precisely why I have such a deep and abiding affection for John, I know that it couldn't have developed had we not first developed such a close friendship. Undressing in front of John or going to the baths together from necessity or convention was one thing, and a thing I daresay I would be able to manage with any man; allowing him to undress me, allowing him to touch me, even to pleasure me - those were very different things, indeed, and I couldn't have managed them with anyone but John, whether male or female, and only with John by virtue of his trustworthiness. And his kindness, of course. It helped to know that, once I was undressed, John was unlikely to do anything which would outrage me. At least, not intentionally.
For awhile I thought that I was taking part in the Ritual because it was what John expected of me, and because it was what I had to do to keep him with me always, the only means by which I could feel assured that he was mine. Once I had been properly catechized in all Stations of the Cross, however, I began to realize that my initial supposition was incorrect.
I had…I had wanted John, but I suppose I didn't know what I wanted with him or even how to go about finding out. There had been an incident, you see - I've written of it in the past, the first time that John threw his arm over me while he was asleep. It had startled and discomfited me as such contact always does, but I suppose that my impulse to flee was defeated by my desire to avoid waking my friend, and so I remained. Not for long, yet long enough to feel something begin to take shape amidst the blur of my anxious thoughts, some indescribable sense of warmth and safety that was so unusual and unsettling that it caused me to panic all over again. It was this enormous sensation of warmth and safe harbor which drove me out of the embrace as much as it was my tactile abnormality, and no amount of distance which I put between John and I thereafter was enough to drive the memory of that first illicit, stolen warmth from my mind. John would not leave me, and I wouldn't...no, I couldn't leave him.
If that is wanting, then I wanted John. It was an utterly new development, and one which I spent the following several years pondering.
Thereafter, whenever John would throw his arm or leg over me in his sleep I would lay and tolerate it for as long as I could; I believe that in the back of my mind I may have considered it training, but I also consciously wanted to steal a bit more of his warmth in my quiet, vampiric little way. I've never revealed this to John.
If I wanted to lay thus with John, I reasoned, to hold and be held by him, then I must have developed a kind of romantic affection for him. After coming to the conclusion that John was almost certainly inverted and the revelation of my feelings would possibly be reciprocated, I began to ponder the possibility of entering into the Ritual; it seemed to be the logical exchange for the privilege of laying in John's arms as I longed to do.
I've embarrassed myself elsewhere with an account of my agonizing about the Ritual and the rather cavalier conclusions I came to regarding the amount of time I would have to prepare myself for full participation. When I revealed my feelings for John by saying that I wanted to kiss him, I had meant just that; I suppose I thought that he would kiss me and we would thereby formalize things and proceed with the courtship at a gradual pace. I had not the slightest idea that only minutes later I would find myself all but naked on my back with my penis in John's mouth.
I didn't stop him simply because I didn't want to stop him. I wanted to know; I wanted to experience this thing that other men seemed willing to kill and die for; I wanted to adequately do what seemed to be expected of me by the world; most of all I wanted to do this thing which John so obviously wanted. I probably should have stopped him, however; most of it was sheer terror, I'm afraid. But just when I would reach the point of giving it up, John would do something novel and breathtakingly pleasurable which would wipe all thought from my mind, and I would remain.
For many months the Ritual remained a great buffeting storm, with peaks of ecstasy and troughs of embarrassment and discomfort in the midst of an ocean of sensations which in the beginning I could not even differentiate. What bemused me greatly that first year was how John's touch could both cause and soothe my discomfort. Delicate, fluttering movements of his tongue, for example - especially when performed upon my penis - made my skin crawl so much that I was quite literally incapable of remaining still to tolerate them for more than a few seconds at a time, and yet John's entire body bearing down on top of me would soothe me like a swaddled baby. John's mouth gliding steadily up and down my penis created the same vaguely irritating sensation I had produced as a lad with my hand, but the sensation of his mouth and throat holding it snugly is extraordinarily pleasurable.
In order to discover these more specific delights, to distinguish them from the tangle of sensations which arise during the Ritual, I had to experience an act multiple times, first winnowing away what was obviously uncomfortable and then experimenting with the rest, gradually learning where I could push myself and what was best left alone, surprised to realize after that first year that very few things remained in the latter category.
What a garden of agonies and delights John led me through, Faceless Denizen.
I remember the first time he touched me as a lover, beginning by moving his hand over mine where it lay resting upon my leg, his fingertips briefly tickling the fine hairs on my upper thigh before he raised his hand to the side of my face. His palm was warm against my jaw, his thumb scratching lightly down my stubbled cheek, his fingers trembling upon the tender skin of my neck just below my ear.
Then John kissed me, and suddenly all of my attention was focused upon the sensation of John's bristly mustache beneath my nose, a sharp contrast to the fragile softness of his lips which lingered against my own, causing my heart to race and my stomach to flutter and my penis to stiffen so rapidly that I could feel it thump and swell with every beat of my heart, as if it were being hoisted hand-over-hand by a pulley.
The problem in those early days was largely due to the fragmentation of my attention and concomitant anxiety resulting from so much intense and disparate stimuli. After that first kiss which I just described, for example, I was continuously distracted by an awareness of my arousal, my reactions, and my embarrassment about both. Most upsetting, however, was the prolonged and unmoving contact that John's other hand was making with my shoulder; my anxiety about this increased the longer his hand remained, so that when John paused to inquire if I found the kiss satisfactory - as if I had anything with which to compare it - and ask if I would like to try another, I nodded to both queries merely with the desperate hope that he would move his blasted hand before I quite lost my mind.
What was I to tell him, Faceless Denizen, this man for whom I had developed such affections and with whose affections I was hoping to be rewarded in return? That I dislike being touched by others? Not only would that essentially end my audition as John's potential mate, but I was also, at that very moment, realizing that such a statement was inaccurate; I had enjoyed the touch of John's lips to mine very much indeed. The idea of attempting to explain the intricacies of my affliction to John had little appeal even under the best of circumstances, and held even less at that particular moment, when my erect penis was conspicuously pushing the front of my drawers up into the air between us. I was still operating with the delusion that John and I were merely going to kiss another time or two, and I was confident that I could withstand that without entirely dishonoring myself.
As he leaned forward to kiss me John moved his hand from my shoulder at last, raising it to cup my jaw again, and I enjoyed a moment's relief before John pressed his lips to mine once more. Another bolt of pleasure shot through me, and I idly marveled to find John's lips so much softer than I had imagined a man's lips would be - after all, one doesn't read many descriptions of them in literature. Then I felt his lips part and the tip of his tongue emerge to begin insinuating itself between my lips, which parted of their own accord when I flinched in surprise, and then followed the shockingly recherche sensation of John's tongue touching and teasing my own. This was so pleasurable that for several moments all I could do was grip handfuls of the bedsheets until John's fingers, which had been trailing down my neck, reached my collarbones and continued trailing.
Suddenly my attention was split between the new and enjoyable thing happening with my mouth and the new, jarring, discomfiting thing happening with my torso, as John's four fingertips and the side of his thumb slipped gently over the skin of my chest. I steeled myself against the urge to squirm away from his hand, but the lower it went the more anxious I became, all the while incapable of ignoring the movements of John's lips and tongue. Just when I was on the verge of bolting in panic, John ended the kiss and averted his hands, one of them sliding around to my lower back, the other up to my left shoulder.
"We'd be more comfortable if we were horizontal," John said, and you might think, Faceless Denizen, that years worth of training in the martial arts of boxing, stick-fighting, and fencing would have prepared me to put up at least a momentary, reflexive defense against what followed, but that is merely because you have not been in bed with my betrothed, who, in amorous situations, transforms himself into a chimerical combination of Mesmer, octopus, and magic carpet.
Seeming to move with a speed and subtlety that he had never evinced in the course of our investigations, in the next moment John had maneuvered me flat onto my back on the mattress, and I caught a brief glimpse of yet another heaven as he lowered himself down on top of me. Unfortunately it was lost in the barrage of unfamiliar stimuli which immediately followed, as were most of my memories of the rest of the debacle. I was drowning in an unceasing maelstrom of sensations, perhaps made even more confusing by the fact that many of them were pleasurable; no sooner would I surface for a gasp of air than another wave would wash over me, until I could fight it no more and all went black.
It was far easier for me in the early days to be the servant rather than the served, to be the busy drone happily tending to my queen as he buzzed and fluttered and honeyed in our secret upstairs hive. Fond are the memories of the merry hours that I whiled away on my greatest and most fascinating experiment - learning how to pleasure my John. It was less discomfiting to touch than to be touched, and the freedom to touch John's body was a pleasure in and of itself. How wondrous to explore his every inch, to discover the luxurious flaxen quality of his hair, to knead and lave and nuzzle his warm, living flesh, to look up and see John with that breathless, abstracted, worshipful expression on his face. Were he not so inexplicably adamant about our mutual participation in the Ritual I should be quite happy to be John's very own hetaera, but this suggestion has always sent him off huffing and sputtering through his mustache. "As if I were living in a brothel and paying Mrs. Hudson to rent a room in which to receive your services!"
It took much longer for me to grow accustomed to being the center of John's attentions, but with his patient guidance I found a new kind of heaven. John has a wonderful talent for making people comfortable with his presence, a knack upon which I have frequently relied in the course of my work and to which I am not myself immune. He also has a lovely way of drawing me into his amusement, of provoking me to smile in spite of myself - often at his own expense, of making me feel laughed with rather than laughed at, and this frequently served to ameliorate much of my embarrassment.
John made a man of me. No - that's not quite accurate, as my chosen variant of the Ritual and my cringing, disastrous early performances thereof would hardly be bestowed with the honor of manhood - an honor which I find to be rather dubious in the first place, quite frankly. It is more accurate to say that John made a human being of me (hmm, an unusual example of the more general being the more precise.) I no longer believed that it was my lot to drift through the straits and narrows of life's waters alone; John proved not to be the anchor I had feared he would be, but rather my rudder, my guide, my safe harbor.
There you have it, Faceless Denizen - the next installment of my penance for all of my various sins. I have made good on my word to John. Autumn is growing late, and his practice is always busy at this time of year. By the time John gets around to catching up with his literary papers it will probably be the holidays, one of which is a particularly important day in our calendar. As I am frequently accused of negligence when it comes to such ceremonial observations, let the literary record show that I was aware of the approach of our anniversary, my dear John, and these remembered adventures are my gift to you.
Ever Yours...Sherlock
P.S. If you're reading this after the 1st, I hope that you owe me an apology.