Maintaining a Personal Life

Chapter Twelve

Sherlock hesitated but held John's gaze as he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper.

John took the paper from him and looked down at it with a deepening frown, recognizing it as the bar receipt from earlier that week with the name of the man John had taken home and his phone number scribbled on the back. "I threw this away."

"I know," Sherlock replied quietly, his demeanour oddly hesitant and uncertain in a way that John still didn't quite understand. "I fished it out of the bin in your room while you were sleeping."

"What—" John's brow knitted together in confusion, and he decided to sidestep Sherlock's utter lack of boundaries for the moment. "You can't possibly still be upset about that."

"No, John, look at it. Really look." Sherlock watched him expectantly before giving a softly exasperated sigh. "The ink."

"It's...black."

"It's the same ink as the one in the book," Sherlock said, and before John could open his mouth, he added, "Yes, I'm certain, I've analysed them both. You can tell just from looking that it's the same nib, but every ink has a chemical date, and these are identical."

"So you're saying...." John paused, his face drawing in with the effort of following Sherlock's train of thought somewhere he wasn't certain he wanted to go.

"Yes." Sherlock stood very still, waiting for John to join him at the only possible conclusion. It took a moment to slowly sink past his disbelief, and once it did, John turned away in a violent spasm to swear under his breath.

"Well that's just bloody fucking fantastic," John snarled bitterly, lashing out to kick the nearest bin rather futilely and earning a sharp pain in his foot for his trouble. His bluntly cut fingernails dug into his palm as he crumpled up the paper in a fit of pique. "I can't even have a one night stand without fucking a bloody psychopath. Brilliant. Just brilliant."

"John—" Sherlock's uneasiness made sense now, the careful way he regarded John as though worried he might suddenly implode. Which was a distinct possibility.

John paced farther away from Sherlock, looking up to take in their surroundings before stalking back and remarking flatly, "Let me guess, we're outside his flat right now. Oh, this is fun."

"I'd hoped to leave you out of this." Sherlock's voice was still quiet, but for some reason his caution only needled John more. "If you had just let me—"

"Well it's too late for that now, isn't it?" One corner of John's mouth twisted up in more of a spasm than a proper smile. "I suppose this one is my fault too. It's what I like, right? Isn't that what you said once? My abnormal attraction to homicidal lunatics."

Sherlock shut his eyes briefly, sucking in a short breath as though John's words had balled into a fist in his stomach. Although John had flung them out with violent intent, it had been a blind swing that he hadn't actually meant to connect and he immediately regretted it.

"I didn't mean—"

"I believe you were targeted specifically." Sherlock's words tumbled out quickly and flattened John's in their wake, "He obviously knew I'd been hired to investigate Simone's murder and mistakenly attempted to gain the upper hand by getting invited into our flat. It was a stroke of luck that you were willing, he can't have known for certain he'd succeed with only the persistent rumours about our sordid affair to suggest your inclinations. He'd been searching for whatever evidence we had when I arrived, though why he started in the kitchen of all places—"