Chapter Text
John surveyed the swimming pool as he sat down with a drink from the bar and smiled friendlily at a woman floating on her back in the water, subtly enjoying her curves and the way her hair floated out around her like a dark, rich, halo. She returned his smile and after a moment sank underwater to swim to the edge and resurface slowly, leaning against the side as she deliberately looked him over and then pulled herself out to walk, wet and dripping, to fetch a drink she’d left near her towel. She looked young, possibly in her late twenties, and John tried not to feel his ego swell at the thought of such a young thing giving him that much attention.
Several more women were chatting in a group on the far right, lounging back with brightly coloured drinks and long legs and attractive swimwear, and John sighed inwardly at the sight, tearing his gaze away, choosing instead to take out his phone to aimlessly stare at its screen for a good two minutes before he put it away again and reclined back.
He had only seen half the hotel and had barely paid attention to the design of what he had seen once he had spotted the bar, but he didn’t think it mattered, surely Sherlock had the blueprints for the hotel packed away on the little folder on his desktop at any rate. Some part of John wished the reason he was there wasn’t because of a case and wished that he was there, in France, for a real holiday, a real break from the ludicrousness of his life with Sherlock, God knew he needed one. John loved his life with Sherlock, but there were times he just wanted to relax and enjoy the normalcy and unexciting day-to-day routine of existence; and so John admired the bodies of the women around him, drank from his glass happily, and appreciated the warm air and soft piano music in the background.
All too soon he knew he’d be dashing across France after the murderers with Sherlock, running at his friend’s side and sharing a breathless grin whilst they worked in sync with each other, hardly needing to talk aloud to understand what the other wanted and needed in the moment of adrenaline fuelled excitement. Of course, this wasn’t always the case, John was more often than not left dazed and amazed and awed by Sherlock, not to mention also being confused, frustrated and angered by him in equal measures; and at times John would puzzle and annoy Sherlock just as much.
Sluggishly, John closed his eyes and relaxed altogether with a long breath and a faint smile, listening in to the sound of the women talking across the room as well as the soft splash of the pool and the sudden pad of bare feet on tiles as someone, possibly the woman from before judging by the gentle, short strides, walked passed his chair and slipped back into the water. The woman’s perfume was sweet and feminine and enthralling, and John savoured it, thinking of soft curves and tanned skin.
It had been a while since John had been with a woman, over several months and counting, and so he reminisced and thought back to his last girlfriend’s full hips, trim waist, and beautiful bosom. She had been adventurous and thrilling and had put up with Sherlock longer than any of his other girlfriends had until he had ultimately broken her resolve and driven her away. John remembered sitting with her in front of the fireplace in 221B kissing slowly and passionately, enjoying each other’s warmth and company with a faint pang; remembered the way her fingers felt as they trailed down his arm and slotted between his fingers.
Someone touched his hand and he jerked, thinking it to be his girlfriend for a crazy second before he then thought that it was perhaps the young woman from the pool, and came back to reality to find Sherlock gazing down at him with a small, infuriated smile. He was still in his trunks from the beach and had left the light shirt he had worn in their room, so was currently topless, the muscles of his abdomen flexing as he straightened up slightly and his ears still red.
“What?” John muttered, looking for his drink and finding Sherlock holding it instead of it being spilt like it should have been. “Finished with your brainstorming, have you?”
“Finished your look around?” Sherlock retorted, lifting his eyebrows and purposely motioning to the women around the pool. “Know the layout of the hotel now, do you? Brilliant, I can’t wait to hear all that you’ve gathered, it must have been a lot, seeing as you’ve been down here for well over an hour. You must have been so detailed and invested in your documentations.”
“Shut up,” John grumbled, reaching for his drink and glaring when Sherlock lifted it out of his reach. “Give me my drink. I need it to deal with you.”
“You are meant to be my boyfriend, John,” Sherlock whispered, leaning down to him. “The whole idea of this ruse is to trick people into thinking we are together, you do not do this by going off to the pool, on your own, to ogle women.”
“I could be bisexual,” John countered, snatching at his drink and spilling it over his fingers in the process. “And gay men still look at women—”
“Not the way, you do.”
John huffed, “And how exactly do I look at them?”
Sherlock’s face twitched and then he leaned back a little, relaxing his features and hooding his eyes with a charming and flirtatious smirk, tilting his head to one side faintly.
“Like this,” he purred, giving John a very captivated and keen glance up and down, his eyebrows lifting with obvious attention. “You do this face at home; you did it to the French girl at the airport; and so you no doubt did it to these women here. Especially the dark haired woman on your left, who is at this very moment, sneaking glances at you every few seconds with quite discernible interest.”
John blushed and clenched his jaw, forcing himself not to give in to the urge to look over at her, “I do not do that face. That face is ridiculous. You are ridiculous.”
“We don’t have to be so blatantly obvious with our charade, but we do have to exude some sort of believability, and you, my Dear John, are not doing this. In fact, you’ve failed to do so since we started. All you do is hold my hand and look at me and treat me like I’m merely a friend, a friend who just so happens to fancy you,” Sherlock said, leaning close once more and sitting down beside John, his Jeremy mask back in place. “You need to treat me like you would a girlfriend. You need to touch me at random. You need to gaze at me like I’m the only person in the world that matters to you. You need to love me, John—Pretend that this might very well be the last time you see me, and therefore you need to memorise every minute, every second, that we spend together, that we touch, that we speak...”
John shifted uncomfortably, “Yeah, well, we can’t all be masters of deceit like you, can we? I’m trying my best here…”
Sherlock looked briefly incensed and then curled his hand around John’s wrist, “I’m going to kiss you now.”
“What?” John exclaimed, sitting up with a fumble and then looking sheepishly around, trying and failing not to lock eyes with the brunette. “Sher—”
“Jeremy,” Sherlock corrected, reaching forwards with his free hand to touch John’s cheek. “Kiss me back. Kiss me back, and pretend to enjoy it, we need to sell this, John. We need to be seen as a couple.”
“No,” John hissed quietly. “You didn’t say I had to do this. You said we’d only have to hold hands and look the part—”
“Something you aren’t doing properly,” Sherlock interjected angrily with his face still Jeremy and his touch soft and timid as it stroked along the line of John’s jaw.
John slipped away from Sherlock as subtly as he could, “People already think we are a couple, back home, without any of this, so I don’t see—”
“We need people to know, not just to guess,” Sherlock told him, gripping John’s chin and pulling him over with stern determination. “Now, kiss me. You brought this on yourself—like I told you before, there is someone, somewhere, around this area, that notices gay couples and targets them, we need to be targeted, John. So you need to stop checking out women and kiss me. Le seul vrai langage au monde est un baiser.” *
“You said that you didn’t think it was directly linked to the hotel as far as you knew?” John muttered as he resisted momentarily and then clenched his eyes shut when Sherlock tilted his head and pushed their mouths together.
The kiss was chaste and gentle and John tried to relax his face and return it when Sherlock squeezed his jaw in reprimand. Sherlock’s lips were plump and soft and warm, and John mimicked their faint tightening purse before he pulled back and gazed at Sherlock with a smile that he hoped didn’t look as forced as it felt. Sherlock eyed him and exhaled deeply in frustration, but smiled back and ducked shyly to lounge beside him as Jeremy, pulling his fingers from John’s wrist at the last moment. John noticed that the brunette was no longer looking at him; in fact, she was no longer sitting at the pool at all from what John could see.
“You could have just kissed my cheek, you know,” John mumbled under his breath, touching his mouth quickly. “Or I could’ve kissed yours.”
“Fine,” Sherlock sighed, propping his feet up and licking what John hoped to be his spilt drink from his fingertips. “Do that next time then.”
John frowned at him, “Next time? There’ll be no—”
“There will be if you keep on,” Sherlock murmured, pointedly staring at John’s frown until he smoothed it, and then sitting forwards to be close to John again. “We’re meant to be on some romantic getaway, John. Would you frown and glare and mutter and run off and flirt with other women whilst on holiday with a girlfriend?”
John looked around the pool and then shook his head faintly, “No…” he sighed, returning Sherlock’s steady gaze and conceding with a brief grin. “Fine. Do you…want a drink? The bar is pretty satisfactory, there’s a vast multitude of drinks here. All of which I’ll be in need of if I’m to continue this pretence with you, I bet…”
Sherlock nodded, “Yes. Thank you.” He said, adding in a sarcastic whisper “…I hope this hasn’t tarnished your heterosexual-ness too badly. Will you never look at me the same way again? Will we drift apart? Oh John, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?”
John snorted with a chuckle as he got to his feet and then flushed, motioning with his glass, “It’s…fine. Just a good thing that no one back home saw, otherwise we’d not hear the end of it,” he laughed, petting Sherlock’s hair fondly but awkwardly, and then walking off when Sherlock huffed and wrinkled his nose at the action, clearly not a fan of the self-conscious gesture.
As John moved passed near the group of women, they all tittered and smiled at him like he was some sort of adorable specimen for them to gawk at, and John tensed with displeasure, staring down at his sandaled feet and then leaning against the bar counter to order another two drinks for himself and one for Sherlock. He felt a mixture of annoyance, embarrassment and something else he couldn’t quite name, and glanced back over at Sherlock to find him stepping into the pool with a smile at a blonde haired woman who pointed at John and grinned. Sherlock seemed to laugh coyly at whatever she said with a wrinkle of his nose and pushed up his glasses, slipping further in to shake her hand and then shake the hand of another woman with dyed black hair that swam to his other side.
Sherlock bent his head and spoke with them, using his hands animatedly but shyly, his arm tensing when the dark haired woman floated closer and slapped his bicep with a giggle. John found the action vaguely flirtatious and scoffed with a roll of his eyes, watching as Sherlock subtly tried to distance himself from her, rubbing at the ginger curls at his nape when she shifted around him to be next to the blonde. Sherlock seemed to be answering more questions than he was asking, and John tried to read his lips, stubbornly ignoring how his own lips tingled with the ghost of Sherlock’s mouth pushed to his just moments ago. He hadn’t had tender human contact for so long that it had felt extremely pleasant and filled John’s body with warmth.
John pulled his gaze away when he realised he couldn’t concentrate on his task and scanned the rest of the pool area instead, seeing a few men mingling with the women, as well as a family of four gathered in the corner. He must have been dozing for longer than he had originally thought, as he hadn’t noticed that more people had turned up at the pool until that moment. John frowned, downed one of his drinks in one gulp once he received them, then wandered over with his other and Sherlock’s, smiling when Sherlock caught his eye and motioned to him with a wiggle of his fingers. John flicked his eyes to the two women, saw them holding hands under the water and couldn’t help the lift of his eyebrows.
“John,” Sherlock beamed, his voice the timid trill of Jeremy. “This is Gabrielle and Ava, they’re from New York; and they’ve been together three years as well, can you believe it?”
John handed Sherlock his drink and slipped off his sandals to sit on the edge of the pool, “What a coincidence!” he said with a playful smirk that he couldn’t stop. “Nice to meet you both. You here for a romantic getaway as well then?” Sherlock’s mouth quirked briefly at the mention of his earlier line and John hid his next smirk by taking a sip from his glass.
Gabrielle, the blonde, nodded happily and slipped an arm around Ava’s slender waist, “Well, it’s a kinda celebratory holiday now,” she said in a way that was meant to prompt John to question her further.
“Oh?” John said glancing between them both and then turning to Sherlock, knowing that he probably already knew what it was judging by the languid position of his hand curled around his drink; that or they’d already told him beforehand. “What’s the celebration?”
“Ava asked me to marry her,” Gabrielle squealed, wiggling the ring at them both with pleasure and even jumping with a burst of excitement, preening suddenly under the attention Sherlock gave her as he put down his drink and pushed through the water to admire it with a delighted and appreciative expression; obviously having not been told beforehand. “She did it on the beach the first night here! I had no idea, it was such a beautiful surprise; everything was so perfect! There was a sunset and wine and dessert and candles, and everything I could have ever asked for!”
John smiled broadly at her and lifted his drink when she looked at him, “Congratulations! That’s wonderful to hear! Or should I say, félicitations!—it’s French for congratulations…” John said, looking at their confused expressions with a surge of embarrassment and then peering at Sherlock. “Right? Um, Jeremy?” *
“Oui,” Sherlock replied, voice suddenly rumbling with laughter as he turned to them in question. “Vous ne parlez pas français?” *
They both blinked at him, utterly clueless and giggled, “I have no idea what you are saying—I know you said, yes, but that’s it,” Gabrielle told him, shrugging and leaning into Ava’s side. “We love the sound of the French language, but don’t understand a thing!”
“Magnifique,” Sherlock replied, sharing a smug glance with John fleetingly before smiling in delight at the two women. “Alors, je peux maintenant vous dire que votre bague est bon marché et qu'Ava a une relation avec trois autres femmes et un homme!" *
John blinked and frowned softly as he tried to work out what Sherlock had said, clearing his throat awkwardly when Sherlock darted his eyes at John with what looked to be mischief and expectation. He understood a few words but Sherlock had said the sentence quite quickly, and his voice had been rumbling with very faint amusement as he had done so, which only made John want to chuckle in automatic response. Gabrielle frowned at Sherlock and then laughed with a shrug, signalling to John and looking for him to help her out and paraphrase what Sherlock had said.
“He said that he…likes your ring and that he wishes you and Ava both well in your engagement,” John translated wrongly, trying hard not to laugh when he went over it again in his head and understood a little more, hiding behind another sip from his glass.
“En outre, vous êtes très laide. Vraiment très laide,” Sherlock added, patting Gabrielle on the shoulder gently with a friendly expression and then taking Ava’s hand in his courteously. “Vous êtes une pute.” *
John coughed suddenly, choking on his drink and Sherlock looked over with a show of impulsive worry, gliding over through the water to pat at his back with a wet and warm hand. John looked at him and watched through his teary eyes as Sherlock’s mouth arched slowly, knowingly, into a smirk and he winked. Sherlock’s hand then skimmed down his spine and pushed on his hips in a silent command, his fingers digging in until John scooted forwards and slid into the pool with him; John pulled his mobile free just in time and shot Sherlock a quick watery glare.
“Are you okay, John?” Ava asked in concern.
“Fine,” John croaked, waving them away and trying not to react when Sherlock lewdly impersonated Ava giving head with his tongue prodding his cheek comically, the entire impression hidden from them skilfully as he had his back still to them both. “It just went down the wrong… hole is all. I’m okay, it’s not the first time that’s happened I can tell you!”
Sherlock’s mouth pressed tightly in amusement, his eyes on John’s, and then his features softened into Jeremy just before he turned to face the women again, his hand dropping to curl around John’s hip. John glanced down at it, thought about what Sherlock had said before about acting like as if Sherlock was one of his girlfriends, and turned to press a dry, quick kiss to Sherlock’s cheek, pushing away the sudden bout of awkwardness and unease at the action, and grinning when Sherlock looked at him sharply with surprise.
“How long are you staying for?” Ava asked them conversationally, breaking them both from their staring.
Sherlock flitted his eyes over them and then over to the side of the pool, before he smiled his Jeremy smile, “Little over a week,” he lied without so much as a hesitation. “You?”
“Several days more,” Gabrielle answered, her head resting on Ava’s fairly sunburnt shoulder. “We got here two days ago—we should all hang out at some point, you know! You’re the only other gay couple we’ve seen around here, as well as the only couple nice enough to have a decent conversation with us! You won’t believe the types of people we’ve seen and met around here sometimes!”
Sherlock’s smile tightened very slightly around the edges as Gabrielle launched into a longwinded complaint about those they had met, or rather seen, around the hotel like a gossiping tyrant, and John tried not to laugh, glancing instead at Ava who rolled her eyes and flashed John an extremely frisky grin. Sherlock had apparently seen it as well as when John met his gaze fleetingly, Sherlock pushed his tongue into his cheek again slowly, pretending to be suddenly aware of something stuck in his teeth to the outside world but instead reminding John of what dear Ava had been up to. John clenched his jaw roughly to stop from laughing and cringing at once, and poked Sherlock in the waist with a sharp jab of his finger, something Sherlock responded to with a squeeze of John’s hip.
❀ ❀ ❀
“And now we have competition,” Sherlock said as soon as their hotel room door closed, throwing his glasses down on a chair in frustration and pacing with a hand in his hair and the other at his hip. “Brilliant, if this wasn’t annoying enough! This is going to complicate so much. Not only do we have to keep a close eye on those two, which means being all…friendly for longer, something I’m sure you can guess is not hugely favourable for me; but we also have to outdo whatever they do to try and catch the eye of the killers so the bloody women don’t get targeted in our place and then brutally murdered—I don’t know how much more of those women I can handle though, John. God, I swear, John, I was five seconds away from drowning myself in that pool, if only to elevate the boredom, the torturous tedium, that came with her talking about her pet poodle.”
“The killers could choose to kill us both?” John shrugged as he patted himself dry with a towel and then draped it over a nearby chair to sit down. “Or…we could break them up? If Ava really has done what you…imply, then we could figure out a way to let Gabrielle find out and put an end to their relationship?—Or is that too cruel?”
Sherlock turned to look at John and strolled over, “Hm. That could work…yes, that could definitely work! They’d surely cut their holiday short and bugger off back to New York after that little scene…” he murmured with a smirk, moving to sit down beside John until John grabbed him by the trunks to stop him. “What are you doing?”
“You’re wet! I’d rather you not ruin the expensive chairs, thank you very much,” John told him with frustration. “And look, if we are going with my suggestion, then just how exactly are we going to go about it? We don’t know much about them, even after the three hour conversation we just had; so it would seem odd if we just started coming up with personal information and alleged allegations.”
“They aren’t alleged—”
“Yes they are, or they’d seem that way coming from sweet, innocent, shy, Jeremy. Jeremy doesn’t pick up on everything Sherlock Holmes does,” John said with a condescending grin, “Gabrielle will automatically jump to defend her fiancé without any solid proof. She won’t listen, and she won’t believe us—we need to somehow get her to find out on her own.”
Sherlock huffed and threw an arm out, “I have proof. I don’t just pull things out of the air, John! I need data, I need clues, I need evidence—I have these, I saw these, so of course I can give her proof!”
“I still think it would be better if she found out herself somehow,” John sighed, watching as Sherlock began pacing again in front of him sulkily. “You can’t do your smug deductive reasoning as Jeremy. It just wouldn’t… sit right. You get on at me about not staying in character and yet you want to break yours to spout a bunch of presumptions at her?”
Sherlock accepted the point sullenly and sat down, ignoring John’s exclamation when his trunks soggily squelched and splattered the seat with chlorine water. John glared at him and after a few minutes of tensed silence got up, deciding to change out of his damp clothes. Putting his mobile away, John grabbed his case and carried it into the bedroom with a sigh, leaving Sherlock to pout and mull things over on his own.
Strangely, John and Sherlock had not properly looked at the bedroom, or the other sections of the suite, as they had instead remained mostly in the living room area near the hotel room door, and then had left for the beach and the pool. The bedroom, when John stepped foot inside it, was immense, and John took a moment to take it all in with raised eyebrows and wide eyes, whistling to himself. He tested the bed with his hand and then wondered if he’d get to actually sleep in it at all during his time there, and if Sherlock would be sharing it with him or if they would take turns, or even if Sherlock would sleep at all.
Undressing, John wandered around the sides of the vast bed and checked inside the bedside drawers and then the wardrobes idly, finding the size of the wardrobes somewhat humorous, wondering if anyone, ever, had filled them with clothes from a suitcase.
“Sherlock,” John shouted as he pulled on another pair of shorts and a t-shirt, moving to peer out of the bedroom window. “Sherlock!”
“John, do I have to have it tattooed to my forehead?” Sherlock sneered as he marched into the bedroom with a scowl, his contacts removed and his arms corded and tensed at his sides in anger. “It’s Jeremy. Jeremy! Say it with me jer-uh-mee. Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy!”
John arched an eyebrow, “Finished?”
“No,” Sherlock said curtly, stepping into John’s personal space and lowering his voice, “You need to stop calling me by my real name, John. Seriously. Stop it. It’s getting ridiculous now. You hardly have to remember much; I made our fake relationship as close to our real relationship as I possibly could, and left you your first name to make it that much more easier for you, yet you fail to remember the simplest of things. I’m the only one, right now, doing any sort of work in this. You’ve barely talked to anyone at all, and when you have, you’ve not put on much of an act, or a character change; you are still you! Even when you try to act differently it comes off stiff and unbelievable. You’re lucky we’ve only spoken to complete and utter morons so far, because if we had been talking to anyone with more than one brain cell between them, they would have noticed your unease straight away and not brought our charade as easily. You have done nothing, contributed nothing, and so remembering a name should be a walk in the bloody park for you!”
“Well, I’m so terribly sorry that I’m not some fantastic actor like you; I’m trying my best, I really am, but this is going to be awkward and wrong and difficult for me to do, and you knew that before you took this case! Anyway, I’ve not said the wrong name aloud in public...much. Just here, and no one is around!” John exclaimed, sweeping an arm at the vast bedroom.
Sherlock stepped closer still with a dark glower, “John, you literally just shouted my name, twice, to get my attention. These walls, even in these expensive rooms, are not incredibly thick, someone will hear you, and we can’t have that!” He hissed. “It’s a good job that I made you keep your own first name, God knows what kind of problems would have arisen if I had submitted to you and given you a new one for this.”
John frowned deeply in shame and sighed, “I’m sorry, okay? I’m just so used to shouting your real name so often that I completely forget and…it won’t happen again. I promise.”
Sherlock nodded with a deep exhale, “Fine. Make sure it doesn’t,” he muttered. “Now, what did you want?”
“What?” John asked in confusion for a second, and then awkwardly shifted. “Oh, right…that. Yeah, it’s nothing important. Forget it.”
“Was it about the room? The bed?” Sherlock asked, eyes moving to the latter. “If you’re wondering which one of us will get it, you’ll be happy to know that it’ll be you. I won’t have time to sleep, and I doubt you want to share it with me, so—”
“You’ll need to sleep at some point, Sher—Jeremy,” John muttered, rubbing his face with a wince at his slip.
“There are sofas and chairs, and enormous carpeted floors, I have a huge assortment of things to choose from. I don’t have to sleep in a bed, you should know this—how many times have you found me asleep on the settee at home?” Sherlock said rhetorically, eyeing the room and then the bed again, stepping over to go and sit down on the edge.
John grabbed him before he made contact and yanked, grunting when Sherlock knocked into him bodily, “Don’t sit on it! You’re still wet from the pool! Get changed, for crying out loud,” he grumbled.
Sherlock rolled his eyes and walked from the room without a word, leaving the door open behind him and coming back with his suitcase, and the towel John had been sitting on wrapped around his waist. He threw the case down on the foot of the bed pointedly and then sighed, rummaging through it.
“I’ve been thinking, before you shouted for me, that it might actually be good for the case that we met Ava and Gabrielle,” Sherlock said as he tugged out some clothes, adjusting the towel.
“Oh, yeah?” John asked, eyeing him and then frowning. “Hang on—Did you just leave your wet trunks on the floor somewhere?”
“What?” Sherlock replied with a furrowed brow.
“Your trunks, where are they?”
Sherlock looked at the bedroom door and then waved a hand, “In the living room area, where I took them off. Anyway, as I was saying—”
“You’re such a slob sometimes,” John muttered, walking out and ignoring Sherlock’s shout of protest, finding the wet clothes dampening a large soaked mess into the carpet. John picked them up with a mutter and moved them into the bathroom, hanging them to dry near the towels.
“John, I was talking to you,” Sherlock complained as he appeared at the bathroom doorway, clad in some trousers with the towel over his shoulder. “I said, it would benefit us to be close to those…women, because it means I get use them, in a way, as bait!”
“What?” John exclaimed.
“Don’t give me that look, John,” Sherlock sighed. “I merely mean, that if we are out somewhere with them, I can concentrate more on scanning our surroundings and looking for anyone suspicious, whilst the women do their annoying talking thing—we’d have to reply, of course, or more importantly, you would have to. Plus, we’ll still need to pretend to be an item, but it would be less so, given that we’d be using—”
“So we’re not going to split them up?” John asked. “We’re going to use them as bait to lure out a potential murderer instead? Brilliant.”
“Potential murderers, plural,” Sherlock corrected, stepping aside when John moved to leave the bathroom, and then trailing after John when he walked back to the bedroom. “We can still split them up later, but in the meantime, we can use them. Tomorrow, we’ll meet with them, we’ll…go to the beach again, or go out to town for a bit, something, anything. The killers murdered a female couple before, so they might be itching to do it again.”
“Maybe they just killed them because they were the only blatantly gay couple around? Not everyone is up for public displays of affection, as I’ve said before,” John suggested. “Oh, and about the…the kiss today. If I make more of an effort to pretend to be with you romantically, can we not do that again?”
Sherlock rolled his eyes and then dropped the damp towel to pull on a top, “Come now, was it really that bad? You brought it on yourself, if you hadn’t have—”
“But if I do better, can we stop the kissing?” John asked, bending to pick the towel back up with a soft glare.
“Possibly,” Sherlock nodded with a loud sigh. “I think it’s a good idea to keep the cheek kissing though. It makes sense and fits with our relationship. Jeremy is shy and unassuming, and you are…you…so it fits that you’d kiss my cheek every so often. I recall you doing the same to girlfriends. Cheek, forehead, nose, neck, hand…we can leave the lips if you find it so utterly disgusting—”
“It’s not that,” John protested, fidgeting uneasily and lifting his hands to gesture with them self-consciously. “I told you, I’m fine with same sex couples and…all of that, people love who they love; but I’m heterosexual, so I don’t kiss blokes on the mouth…it’s just…odd and uncomfortable for me. I wouldn’t say it’s disgusting, I’m not disgusted, I don’t feel sick or anything like that, that’s not it, I just…it just feels wrong.”
“… You liked it,” Sherlock stated, his eyes narrowed and flitting.
“What? No! Aren’t you listening?” John said. “I wasn’t revolted or sickened, but I wasn’t all for it either. I don’t kiss blokes. It’s just… awkward.”
Sherlock regarded him for a moment with squinting, penetrative eyes, and then slowly smiled, shrugging, “Fine. I can’t completely grantee you won’t have to kiss me on the mouth again, but the cheek is almost a definite, if only for aesthetic purposes.”
John inclined his head with a sharp sigh, “Fine. Cheek kisses I can…do,” he muttered, eyeing Sherlock’s quirking smile with a blush. “If I have to.”