Sherlocked

Rose

I walked into a pub where a jukebox played nothing but 80’s music. A song played, and a melancholy voice sang, “I don’t want to wake up on my own anymore.” I thought I could understand how he felt.

I ordered a vodka tonic, something I had never really liked but my mind was on it because my mom drank a lot of them, and they always seemed to get the job done for her. I sipped the drink with slight distaste and ran my fingers over the slightly warped wood on the bar before a gruff cockney accented voice drew me from my daze.

“Ay, you’re that girl!” the voice said, and I looked up to see one of the bartenders eyeing me with recognition.

“Who?” I asked, feeling somewhat confused. The man raised up a tabloid covered with little droplets of drink stains from sitting on the bar. I squinted to get a better look in the dim lighting of the bar, and saw a familiar profile shot from a long-range camera lens. It was my profile. And next to me was the famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. The bartender let me grab the paper to get a closer look before turning to attend to his other patrons.

I flipped to the page the cover indicated, and my heart sank when I saw several photos of the two of us splashed across the page like a secret diary made public for the world to poke and jeer at. The headline in block lettering read, “Sherlock Holmes in Love?”

There were three photos of the pair of us, one taken at the Chinese restaurant from across the street, Sherlock and I visible past the glare of a windowpane, a snap shot of one of the first real personal conversations we had ever had. The second one was of the two of us walking back from the restaurant. I was smiling, my eyes on the sidewalk, but the sight of Sherlock made my heart clench. He was walking, his hand nearly touching mine, all the while smiling down at me, his expression unguarded in a way I had never seen before. I took another large gulp of my drink as I flipped the page to see more photos of me, walking up to 221B Baker Street, a bag of groceries in hand.

The last photo was possibly the worst. We were emerging from the cab outside of St. Bart’s Hospital, and in the center of the shot were our intertwined hands. It was the one day when I had been so sure that he needed me there as much as I needed to be there. But I had apparently been mistaken.

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John

“Saw that, did you?” I said, sitting next to Rose, who was easily the prettiest young woman at the bar. She was getting looks from every unattached man in the establishment, and even some who were not so free to justify their roaming eyes. But Rose was too absorbed in the tabloid warped by spilled drinks to notice any of them. And empty glass sat in front of her, and as I sat, she ordered another. I ordered a beer.

“You shouldn’t be walking around like that. It’ll only take you longer to heal. But I suppose you know that better than I, doctor,” she remarked, pointing to my leg as she tipped her drink into her mouth.

“I was hoping to spare you from the tabloids, or at least have enough time to warn you about them. Sherlock is a bit of a celebrity here in London.” I remembered feeling especially worried when I first saw the issue the tabloids published. I also knew that Sherlock never would have thought to warn Rose about what she was getting herself into by associating with him. “I was afraid it would cause…tension.”

She laughed in a way that made her look suddenly older and world-weary. “The tension was already there to begin with. I didn’t expect this to happen, John. I didn’t ask for it, but I should have known better with a man like Sherlock. I’m a magnet for people who need me but give me nothing in return. Sherlock doesn’t mean to do it, and that almost makes it worse, because I can’t bring myself to hate him properly. And I was silly to think that he really needed me. After all, he has you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. And the only things I could come up with where things that she didn’t believe and didn’t want to hear. Because I knew that if she were to leave him, Sherlock would never be the same, and it wouldn’t be for the better. She was the only person I had ever seen get through to him, the only person able to make him feel like an ordinary man in the most extraordinary way.

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Sherlock

Alone in the house, I stared at the painting in front of me, still unable to move. I wondered what had happened to me, why I wasn’t able to see things the way I had before. I tried to look around the room, to assess and analyze and pick apart the four walls that surrounded me, but she was all I saw. She was everywhere, and when I thought about leaving to escape her, I realized that she had taken my scarf again on accident, mistaking it for hers. I picked up her scarf, and was assaulted by a waft of her perfume. It filled my head with it’s faintly floral scent, like roses, and I was catapulted headlong into the memory of her lips on mine, feeling my pulse spike in my veins, my temperature rise. Sentiment is a chemical defect found on the losing side. And for the first time in my life, I was very, very afraid of losing.