She resumed being John Watson again, but she was not sure in particular what she wanted of Holmes. If he was incapable of physically loving her, nothing could be done, and yet being cold and distant to each other could not be the answer either. They were dearest friends; they loved each other. She could not think of leaving and living without him, however healthy or rational that might be.
So in a makeshift way, not really deciding to, they continued their kisses and embraces as before, and sometimes he spent the night in her bed again. At times it was awkward to be close; at other times it was warm and comforting. They played it by ear each night, as day after day and week after week passed.
To their mutual surprise, one night after a late dinner to celebrate Watson's publication of her latest set of tales, while they lingered in her bed cosily, Holmes was perhaps sufficiently intoxicated by alcohol, or sufficiently relaxed by a lack of pressure and expectation, or both, to make love to her with more than just words and slight touches. He was remarkably uninhibited and passionate, such as his kisses of her had always suggested that he would be. She thrilled in his feverish heat, and loved him in return with all the desire she had long felt for him. She suspected that Holmes must have been an incredible sexual being in his Bohemian youth, as he was now, after so long an abstinence.
After their rapturous end, they collapsed tiredly and Holmes lay breathlessly as if stunned and amazed by their unexpected success. When she leaned near to kiss him fondly, he still blinked at her with half-dazed eyes and stroked her tousled hair back from her face with fascination. "My dear," he sighed, uncertain of his voice.
She shook her head and chuckled teasingly. "No wonder you swore off lovemaking. You are dangerous to the moral fibre of the nation, Holmes."
He smiled momentarily, then looked doubtful and worried. "I--I do not know if you can expect the same of me every night."
She kissed him reassuringly and lay her head upon his chest, where she could still feel his rapid heartbeat as it gradually subsided. "It's all right. I am already used to having the most eccentric of English husbands. I can be as patient for your physical affection as for your verbal affection."
As time passed, she remained true to her word, calmly accepting his habitual coldness, in and out of bed, for the rare and precious times that he could be warm to her whether in words or deeds. Holmes now slept in her bed almost every night, even if he did so chastely, and he had given her a plain gold wedding band that she wore always on her watch-chain as a reminder of his affection whenever he was being particularly insufferable. It was a ring that Holmes had used during their first case together, and it fittingly represented all their years together, as friends, and now more.
The mark of her love that he wore in return was her own watch, the very watch which her brother James had never remembered to retrieve from her once he had made America his permanent home. She had insisted on giving Holmes the family heirloom and taking his own watch for herself, but he had seemed troubled and reluctant to accept the gift. She told him that its intrinsic value meant not nearly as much to her as the fact that it too recalled their early days together. So he finally accepted the gift and treated the watch with the greatest care. Indeed, there were many times that she caught him staring long at the inscribed initials, "H.W." on the back of it, as if reflecting on the irony of how the watch had bypassed her brother James for yet another Watson possessing the first initial H.
With their exchange of these tokens, they felt as bound to each other as if they had sanctified a true marriage under British law. She fondly called him her husband in a private, informal sense, realising now that British law would be hard-pressed to apply itself to their unique relationship. They made love so infrequently, she lived as a man, and Holmes had long disregarded any laws and customs that struck him as having no sense or use to him.
Indeed, marriage would be quite useless to them. Watson was well past her childbearing years, creating no need for a legitimising union. Witnesses to their wedding would necessarily be scarce, only including Mycroft Holmes, Mrs. Hudson, and Watson's kin in America, since all other persons knew them only as two men. Watson would have to don feminine attire, not only at the ceremony, but also at the solicitor's office when seeking a licence. Moreover, records of engagement and marriage were public things, and they certainly did not need publicity about their secret. Though she might well use her own true name of Helena Watson on official documents, Holmes could not sign his true name without someone coming across it and growing curious as to whom the famous misogynist and bachelor could possibly be marrying. If they must misrepresent themselves and not even enjoy a public happiness with close friends, what would be the point of performing such a ceremony at all? None at all.
So they willingly trusted to one another, as lovers of a strange sort. She spent their nights together enjoying his closeness, his kisses, and his intimate whispers while they lay in bed. When he was in the mood to permit it, she would explore his body and intently experiment in arousing him as far as he could go. In return, Holmes reciprocated as much warmth as possible, showing her the ways in which he most enjoyed touching her. She found that he seemed to like her skin, especially upon her arms, neck, and face. Though she was not soft and smooth like some milk-white, pampered female, he did not care; indeed, he cherished her calluses from work and her firm muscles from their often physically demanding lives. He often kissed and tickled her navel too, adoring the way that this stimulus could make her groan deep in her throat. And of course, he always lingered the most upon drinking in her breathless mouth.
On his irregular nights of capability and ecstasy, occurring about every month or so depending on how relaxed he could become, she freely indulged her desire for him without having to worry about stopping when he could go no further. Yet, perhaps feeling guilty for denying her such passion the rest of the time, Holmes eventually adopted a puzzling new tactic in his lovemaking. One night, feeling unable to make love with her in the usual way, he chose to make love to her instead, applying decidedly nonconformist methods to satisfy her. As if they had not already overstepped the boundaries that strict moralists of their day had defined concerning perversion and sex!
Again his unexpected talent and expertise startled her. She wanted to ask him where and when he had learned such indelicate uses for his hands and mouth, but he rendered her incapable of such questions as he teased, probed, and sought out every nuance of her sensual reactions. She could not help losing herself in his touch. Perhaps he had learned these techniques in his "instructive youth", a period from which he would not have given any details anyway.
When he finished seeing to her sole pleasure, she caught her breath and soon attempted to do something for him, but he simply withdrew, insisting that he needed no reciprocation, his libido being at its usual low level at present. She found that remark disheartening and protested that he ought not to have touched her then and made her believe that he was willing.
He frowned. "Being willing matters little if the result is ... disappointing." He shrugged as if it were trivial. "Why not love you in what ways I can, and avoid the alternative of being an insufficient husband?"
Appalled by that remark, she shook her head and caressed his cheek, "You aren't insufficient to me, Holmes. Not at all. You're everything I want."
He smiled at her tenderness, but his eyes remained unconvinced as he pulled her hand away from him and withdrew again. He quietly turned his back to her on the bed and settled beneath the bed-covers, only murmuring that he must do something for a healthy, passionate woman like herself.
Watson stubbornly slid her arms around him, though he tried to brush her off. She insisted, "If you had the will to deny yourself anyone's touch for so long, and purely for your cases too, surely I can deny myself sometimes my mere carnal urges for the nobler, greater object of your love?"
He did not turn to her, whispering, "I could not ask that of you."
"You don't need to ask. I willingly give it, as I give you my love." She kissed the back of his neck warmly and leaned her head close against his shoulder.
He said nothing, but remained unresponsive to her coaxing, so she reluctantly gave up.
On other nights, Watson attempted to arouse Holmes's desire anew, but she found him as stymied as usual. Even with continued practice, they still suffered the usual bad odds against their success. In fact, the infrequency of their lovemaking soon became both worse and better, in some ways.
The moment that he felt himself failing to succumb to their tangling embraces, Holmes resorted to repeating the tactics he had used before, despite her protests.
Insisting that he did not have to indulge her, she still tried to focus on his own state, but he regarded such attempts as frustrating. Did he need to prove something to himself, Watson wondered?
So the nights that they coupled, or even tried to, grew fewer as Holmes chose to multiply the number of nights that he made love to her without regard to himself. She disliked the trade, pleading, "I don't want so much your touch, as your intimacy, your connection to me!"
He countered softly, "We have long been intimate friends already. I have shared with you parts of my heart and my mind that I have given to no other. Only let me give you this intimacy too. Let me hear you cry my name..." He kissed her throat with something like passion, persuading her into giving in before she realised that he had circumvented her protests once more.
Tired of arguing always, she settled for his preference in lovemaking on most nights now. In the beginning, at least, he surrendered somewhat to her wishes, for her touching and making love to him helped to intensify her own arousal, but he could never entirely relax with her and finish that way. So he would see to her own pleasure with skill and generosity, then withdraw from her the rest of the night. She decided that he was exhibiting that same kind of selfless denial of his physical needs that he had practised all those years for his cases and his objectivity. Now he did so for what he considered her benefit. She still sought some way to convince Holmes to return to even a faulty mutual lovemaking rather than persist in this one-sided indulgence, but had no success so far. Meanwhile she paid close attention to anything and everything she did in their foreplay that seemed to please him at all, for perhaps a physical persuasion would prove more convincing than any mere words.
Finally, about a year since they had first begun their unusual love affair, she asked him one night to try to make love with her again. "For my sake." After a silence he consented, responding to some look in her eyes and realising that it had been some months since she had even asked him to do this.
They had to go slowly this time, step by step. Were they so out of practice in coupling? She tried all the teasing caresses and kisses that she knew to arouse him. He still had difficulty with her but he responded somewhat, sighing her name with warmth and closing his eyes as she moved beyond mere foreplay and into something more serious indeed. He swallowed and shifted pleasurably with her fiery kisses down his throat and chest, her hands stroking the interior of his thighs and the slightly flushed length of his member.
"Watson," he murmured again, achingly. He ran his fingers through her short hair and breathed unsteadily as his heartbeat quickened.
She toyed with his left nipple a little longer in her mouth, and now scraped his spine with her fingernails. Her other hand roamed, the fingers happening along that little stretch of skin known in anatomy as his perineum and pressing against it none too gently while she reached for his scrotum near it. He reacted rather unexpectedly to this touch, arching back from her and groaning.
She smiled to discover a new source of pleasure for him, sitting up and watching the delightful rapture on his face. She reached to kiss his lips fondly, but at that moment, he breathlessly sighed, blinking, "John..."
John. He called her that only jestingly, and never in bed. Never Helena either, but most certainly never John. More than that, the tone he used made her grasp a sudden, most unwelcome realisation that made her withdraw from him sharply now. She whimpered in distress, turning and folding her arms about herself.
He realised his unguarded mistake and sat up too, searching for words.
She said it finally, cringing with pain. "You--you want me to be John. The John Watson that we both created. You really want--" she shook her head, not sure whether to be disgusted or just horribly, horribly miserable.
Holmes sat there in the darkness of the bedroom and could hear already that she was crying. It wracked him with guilt and he ventured to touch her shoulder, but he found that she only shrank away from him. "I love you," he said helplessly, but knew that the words did no good. He rose from the bed, threw on his dressing-gown, and for the first night in many, many months, left her room.
Alone, she collapsed and sobbed on her bed wretchedly. Of course, of course! Why had she been so blind? He made her up every morning, staring at her like some fond creation of his, like an artist proud of his work, like some Pygmalion in love with his Galatea. He had loved to kiss her with her false mustache on. He had desired her in bed only partly, only with an effort. He had taken twenty-odd years to profess his so-called love for her. He might as well have called her James, as John.
Holmes spent the remainder of the night in his own room, brooding and smoking his pipe, although pipeful after pipeful did not help him find some resolution for their terrible dilemma. Indeed, had this problem been one that could be solved with rationality and rumination, he would have never returned to Baker Street ten years ago, never have come back to Watson as to an unhealthy addiction.
He would have remained where he was, in the arms of his former lover, the one who had taught him everything of attraction and desire and pure animal heat between men. Richard had taught him the skills of theatre as well, the art of costume, makeup, and how to tell, and live, the most convincing of lies.
Holmes had given up such Bohemian indulgences, of course, once he left theatre to concentrate solely on his detective profession. And when the Watson who stayed with him turned out to be Helena instead of James, Holmes had thought himself strong enough to not care about the petty needs of the flesh. But he had forgotten to consider the needs of the heart.
So after Reichenbach, he had rushed in desperation to Richard's current theatre in the heart of Germany, had presented himself in the actor's dressing-room like a lonely fool. Richard had welcomed him with the fondest of kisses and expressed an amused surprise at his return. Then Holmes had told him with difficulty that he had fallen in love unwisely.
"That Watson chap?" Richard had murmured with a frown, thinking that he understood entirely, and Holmes had only nodded, letting Richard believe what he wanted to. His old mentor and lover had commiserated tenderly, "We all fall for the ones who don't want us, now and then."
It had been some small comfort that Richard had been willing to play the part of Watson and take Holmes to his bed again. It had been the only healthy thing to do, surely? But even that slight comfort proved inadequate after a time. It was an act, an artificiality that grew more stark each time one of Watson's stories reached the Strand, and Holmes read them as if they were love letters from her, reminding him of all they had shared and why he had grown to love her so irrationally. Trying to distract Holmes from his memories, Richard introduced him to other men of their inclination, but still could not cure Holmes of his unwise love.
Why her, for heaven's sake? Why did he crave her particular touch? Her kisses, her voice, her laughter? Why must he be trapped in an impossible love, unhealthy to either him or Watson? He had been selfish to ever return to her, to hurt her this way. If only he had never confessed that he loved her, never been tempted after all these years to stop denying himself her warmth and her arms. More than that, Holmes had deluded himself with the comfortable lie that Watson knew and understood him just well enough to not ask too much of him. Just enough, but not too much. How useless, how deceitful, love was. He wondered if Watson hated him now, despised him utterly. He would not blame her.
The morning after was vastly awkward and tense. She had risen for breakfast in her dressing-gown, hoping to withdraw with her tray back to her room before Holmes rose. Instead she caught him, fully dressed, about to go out their sitting-room door. They met each other's eyes in uncomfortable anguish.
Mrs. Hudson's footsteps on the stairs interrupted them. Realising that she was undisguised and her eyes still a puffy red mess from last night, Watson withdrew immediately and Holmes stepped back from the door.
"Mr. Holmes," Watson could hear Mrs. Hudson's voice when the door opened. "There's a young gentlemen here to see you. A client."
"Now?" Holmes asked without enthusiasm. "It is still early yet, Mrs. Hudson. Can he not wait at all?"
"No, Mr. Holmes, I do not think so. He's most distraught. He says his case is quite urgent, and he keeps muttering of the police!"
"Very well," Holmes sighed reluctantly. "Show him up."
"Yes, sir."
After the door closed behind Mrs. Hudson, Watson saw Holmes walk dejectedly to the breakfast table and sit down there. He picked at his food and then glanced in Watson's direction. She swallowed at meeting his eyes, and said only, "I shall dress."
When she returned to the sitting-room fully costumed, the client in question was already excitedly in the middle of reciting his case. Holmes attempted to calm him, and Watson assured the young man with her best bedside manner and some forkfuls of the breakfast that Holmes had not consumed.
The case required their efforts immediately after they finished breakfast, and lasted well into the day, so that they had not a moment to withdraw from each other. If it ever took an effort of will for her to sustain her male persona, this was surely the day. Their words were strained and they avoided looking at one another whenever possible.
At last they were able to return to Baker Street. When Watson stepped down from their hansom cab, Holmes hesitated, as if he considered not getting out. However, escaping to Diogenes seemed not nearly so appealing or useful as it had seemed this morning, and he finally alighted and paid their driver.
By the time he came inside, Watson had already hurried upstairs and retreated into her bedroom. When he stood outside her door, he could hear her slamming and knocking things about as she undressed, and her shoes made solid thumps against one wall.
He entered quietly, and she turned round at him, her face more miserable than hateful. She sank down on her bed with a lonely defeat and shook her head. "How could you?" she whispered brokenly. "How could you deceive me all this time?"
He shut the door behind him, then walked over to her window, crossing his arms and looking out into the fog. "Selfishness," he answered simply, then shrugged. "After a while I thought that in some way I could make you happy, despite my deficiencies. You never would leave me."
"I had not seen through layer upon layer of your lies yet." She shrank into herself, choking down a sob. "I thought you loved me as I loved you."
He would have answered, "I do," had it not been another equivocation, another uneasy half-truth.
She was fully reduced to tears now and shook her head with despair. "It isn't true, is it--what you said the night I told you about Mycroft? I'm the one who's a mere substitute for the one you love. If I had never come to Baker Street and my brother James had never left, had shared all our history with you all these years, you would have loved him instead, wouldn't you?"
Holmes turned round to her, appalled by her accusation.
She bit her lip miserably. "It took you twenty years to love me. You'd have loved him ages ago!"
He refuted the notion. "Those are mere possibilities in your head. They are worthless phantoms."
"It's true!" she cried. "You wish it were."
He turned back toward the window and shook his head, swallowing. "Even if I should have loved him, I should hardly be happy. Your brother James is very decidedly fond of women, remember?"
She blinked, staring at him.
"What good is love, unrequited?" he whispered more to himself than to her.
She frowned and understood the irony. "Then the situation would be ours now, only reversed." She had not realised before that Holmes, too, might suffer from a desperate love for someone who could not, would not, return it.
He nodded, drawing an uneasy breath. "And then when it changed, when it wasn't about him anymore, but about you..." He shook his head and did not finish.
She would have said something in return, but he suddenly removed his watch then, her watch, from its chain and placed it upon her dressing-table. Just as wordlessly, he left and shut the door after him.
She sat up in her bed in the silence. Really it was not even her own watch, but her brother James's. No wonder Holmes had tried to refuse it, not caring for the reminder. She had been so blind.
She realised that her own self-deception, in conjunction with his lies, had furthered each stage of their unhappy love affair. It occurred to her that he had shielded her time and again from having to know the limits of his love for her. From having to learn the painful truth that she had mistaken him for a very different sort of man than he was. Surely it should have been evident to her, what with friends like Thurston who often joked that Holmes seemed rather too fond of bachelor life, and of Watson? "You're sure you don't want to move out and have your own practice? You cannot stay there always with, um, him," they had hinted.
Repeatedly, she had believed that her well-meaning friends simply did not know Holmes, nor herself, as well as they thought. But now she could see that she had been wrong. Not only had he not been a cold, unfeeling fish all these years, but he was a man of illicit passions. Buried passions, of course, subdued by self-control and caution, but real passions nonetheless. And she had read him entirely wrong.
She looked at the ring that she wore on her watch-chain and remembered the tenderness of his face when he had given it to her, the way he had kissed her hands and then her lips. He had wanted to make her feel more like his wife, his dear love. It seemed that he had privately resolved that, if they could not both be happy together, he would do anything in his power to make one of them happy at least. A vicarious kind of love. How strange a man he was.
Blinking back her tears at last and swallowing her pain, Watson rose from her bed finally and left the room. She found Holmes in his own bedroom, seated at his dressing-table with his head resting upon his folded arms. A defeated despair that mirrored her own.
He looked up when she entered, and frowned uncertainly when she approached him. To his surprise and disbelief, she leaned near and kissed his lips lightly, then murmured, "I can forgive you, in time, for what you've failed to say. What you've done."
He blinked at her, and hardly dared to touch her cheek. "Can you?"
She nodded and sighed wearily. "But I don't know what to do now," she shook her head, "about us. Knowing the truth, I cannot be happy anymore this way. And you--" She winced and could not continue.
He nodded and pulled her near to him, kissing her cheek and not knowing either what would become of them. He whispered softly, "Just believe, at least, that I always did love you, in my own way."
She closed her eyes, running her hands through his hair. "In your own way."
They were silent and motionless for several minutes, before she pulled away from him with finality and found her voice at last. "I should go. Somewhere away from here. Another practice perhaps."
He could only frown at her and then look away painfully.
She saw his wounded eyes, and pled with him, "How can I stay with you, Holmes? Do you imagine that we could recover or return to mere friendship here?"
He winced and shook his head reluctantly. Despite the logic behind her departure, he only knew that there would be no safe distance for his heart, stubbornly clinging to hers after all these years.
She shrugged unhappily, remembering the early days of their love, one very long year ago. "Now I know why you kept trying to discourage me so much. Well, you've got your wish at last, Holmes. You've succeeded in driving me away."
He finally spoke, meeting her eyes and shaking his head. "I thought it would be fairer to you, wiser, if you left me, yet I never had the strength to end the deception, to just let you go. Never could be that unselfish."
She wondered at the contradiction between his self-blame and the selfless quality which she had realised that he had shown in his love for her. Kissing his cheek again, she turned at last from him and left wordlessly.