A fist flew and the crowd cheered in unison, an ugly, ferocious jeer that swelled and swooped as the fight went on. Holmes was a blur in the centre, his usually pristine brow flushed and sweaty, his cheeks and chin smudged with dirt, his grin stretched wide and taunting. I could see the joy in his face too, the power and the freedom and the adrenalin pumping through his veins. Through his heart.
My own beat faster.
Holmes wasn't the strongest in the circle, but he was likely the fastest and certainly the cleverest. He took on his opponents fiercely, dodging their blows and using their weight and their predictability against them for victory after victory.
But even Sherlock Holmes was not infallible, and by the time he slipped out of the circle and back toward me, he was bleeding from a cut above his eye and scrapes bloomed across his cheeks. His weight settled unevenly on his hips too, as though favouring a bruised rib or two.
'I think that's it for tonight,' I said, letting Holmes lean heavily on my shoulder, leading him away.
'As you say, Doctor,' Holmes allowed, laughing and gasping. He submitted to my prodding fingers, and when I was satisfied, I submitted in turn to watching the remaining matches as he studied the other boxers.
We were nearly home when we first heard the sound: a high-pitched whimper. A plea of pain.
Holmes stopped mid-sentence, cutting off our comparison of the night's boxers to the eventual champion to listen carefully. The sound came again, louder, and he was off in a flash, darting down an alley in search of its source.
He found it tucked behind a jumble of abandoned crates: a grey-brown dog with matted fur and a leg crusted with blood. 'Here, doggy,' he cooed, digging through his pockets for something to entice the creature with and finding half a biscuit. 'Here, boy.'
The dog shrank back in fear, but Holmes waited patiently, murmuring gentle encouragements, until at last the animal shuffled forward and quickly took the biscuit from his fingers. I watched with not a little awe – I'd never seen Holmes so tender – and finally made my way forward to examine the bloody leg. 'Broken, I think.'
'Miserable thing,' Holmes agreed. After a few long minutes of quiet petting and cooing, Holmes was able to gather the dog into his arms, heedless of his coat. 'I know a fellow who will be able to fix this up in no time,' he said, hoisting the dog up, trying not to jostle him. 'He'll be able to find a proper home for the poor boy.'
I admit that I drifted for several years. My constitution, though healed, would never be the same as it had been before the war, and I was an old man already at the age of thirty. Perhaps I should have set up a practice, for my banking-account was never flush, but I satisfied my obligations and myself with odd here-and-there positions whenever the need arose.
At any rate, my eccentric companion never said a word of my idleness.
I actually thought Holmes enjoyed having me about the rooms. He was a solitary sort naturally, though good-natured; he was also peculiarly exacting in his habits, and preferred to have them unchanged. I supposed I had simply become a part of those habits – an audience for his ejaculations, a ready assistant in his myriad experiments. I occasionally sat in on his cases, though I just as often disappeared up to my own bedroom instead; more often, I accompanied him to the music halls, or to dinner, or even once or twice to the laboratories at St Bart's Hospital.
I was comfortable. More than that, I was content. Holmes kept me on my feet as often as he left me to my own devices, and as we quietly marked the passing of each January, there was nowhere else I would have preferred to be.
It was nearing midnight, one warm September night in 1887, when there was a furious pounding on the door downstairs. Holmes and I had stayed up late, sharing a brandy and discussing some new philosophical theory of the self – 'Rot,' Holmes had said, and I’d rejoined, 'Rot, but,' not quite agreeing – and so he went to investigate before Mrs Hudson could be drawn out. He returned some minutes later accompanied by a shaking man, struck pale with fright.
'My friend and colleague, Doctor Watson,' Holmes introduced. 'Watson, Mr Terrence Hesse.'
'My apologies for the hour, sir,' Hesse said, terribly politely. 'It's only that I'm afraid for my life.'
'Let me pour you a brandy for the nerves,' Holmes said, his voice low and soothing. 'You are quite safe here. Now tell us your story.'
Hesse told an extraordinary tale about a job he'd taken laying tile in the hall of a large Kensington home, being paid far too much, and how the master of the house had been violently killed. Hesse, working just outside the gentleman's study, had heard nothing at all, but the entire household staff had accused him of the crime.
'They pointed at me!' he cried. 'Though each should have known I was in the hall all the while, by the noise I was making. Even the butler!'
'And you ran?' Holmes surmised.
'What else was there to do? My wages don't care for just my own upkeep, sir. I share rooms with another fellow, a tile-layer like myself, though he's been out of work from an accident these past weeks. I went out the back as quick as I could and rushed home to him, but I could hardly stay where they'd have found me. I'd heard your name, sir, from the street Arabs, and thought I'd see if you could help me.'
A lesser man might have thought that Hesse's story was an obvious lie intended to save himself, but Holmes' caution in meting out justice was firm, and he was staunch in his refusal to jump to conclusions.
'And you say you heard nothing from the study?' Holmes asked, putting his fingers to his lips in thought.
'None, sir.'
'And each of the household staff accused you, to a man?'
'All of them, sir, even those I had not seen. But tile-laying – it's fine work, you know, but there's a fair amount of tapping and other noise that goes on. They must have heard me at it.'
Holmes hummed, muttering to himself for a moment, then went for his hat and coat. 'Come, Watson,' he directed. 'We must get to the bottom of this grotesque business.'
The Hesse case had led Holmes and I on a chase through the slick dark streets of London, ending with swift fists and Holmes' triumphant cry rising into the night. He'd been panting with excitement, disheveled and bruising beautifully around the eye, and I'd been drawn in, transfixed by his energy.
By the time I fell into bed, the adrenalin in my veins had transformed into something hot and golden in my spine, in my belly, my groin. It bloomed insistently, where there had been nothing for years – not since the Jezail bullet. Not since the fever.
There was definitely something there now: something novel and unexpected and so very missed.
I struggled against my nightshirt and closed a hand around my prick, somehow surprised to find myself hard even though I felt the demand, the eagerness. I wanted to take my time, to enjoy it, but as soon as I touched myself, urgency slid into desperation. My hand rushed along my shaft, twisted at the head in an old familiar fashion; my pace quickened, rising to the edge; I thought about running, and about fighting, and about the crook of Holmes' smile, the shine of his eyes, his face as he turned to me, breathless and victorious – and I came, I came hard, and my mind went completely, blissfully blank.
Simpson's was busy on the next evening, the late-night wanderers drawn toward the promise of a hot cup of coffee or a sandwich. Across the table, Holmes seemed to revel in the noise, his eyes glowing and his hands fluttering as he recounted some story of his youth.
I was barely listening to him. Instead I was watching, following Holmes' fingers as they moved from his coffee spoon to his mouth, to settle on his leg before wandering off again. His cheeks were flushed, first from the excitement of the case – a tawdry little bit of counterfeiting, but a thrilling arrest nonetheless – and now from the coffee and the heat of the room, and I wondered how warm those cheeks would be to the touch. Would he turn his head into my hand, if I reached out?
The thought took me off-guard and I sat back, suddenly realising how far I'd leaned forward. It had been a long time since I had had a thought like that, and I knew it was not one of a devoted friend. It was a thought of gentleness, of intimacy. It spoke of an affection that ran too deep in places that ought to have been reserved, set aside for someone else.
Of – attraction.
When I sipped at my coffee again, it had gone bitter.
Fog rolled in.
London drifted through the hazy sea for days, damp seeping drearily into the corners of Baker Street, settling an uneasy silence over everything like a thin coating of dust. My leg and shoulder ached constantly, but no matter how high the fire was built, I could not shake the chill.
The sober atmosphere seemed to set Holmes on edge as well, and he was in and out of our rooms at all hours of the day and night with barely a word to me. His long absences left me feeling as alone as I had been before moving into 221B, and I could not help but wonder whether he had been driven out into the night by something he had seen in me – something I was only barely starting to see in myself.
It would not have been the first time Holmes had known something about me before I knew it myself, after all. He knew so much at a single glance – there was no telling what sharing rooms with someone might reveal to him.
Outside, the fog curled thick and yellow against the windowpanes, and finally I took myself to bed to escape from it. I would find no resolutions that night anyway, no answers: the darkness was too impenetrable, and the future, I feared, too bleak.