Consequences of Flirting (Teacher x Student)

Chapter 15 - Hold Your Hand

"So you can drag me through hell,
if it meant I could hold your hand."

- Follow You
Bring Me The Horizon

"Make yourself at home," Sherlock's keys landed unceremoniously on the coffee table, amongst the discarded newspapers and abandoned mugs, as he used his now free hand to direct me towards his sofa. I followed his instructions obediently as he disappeared round the corner, tucking my feet underneath me and relaxing into the cushions.

The flat was just as messy as ever, but I decided that was what I liked about it. More dust had settled on the ornaments around the room, enough for their neglect to be visible. A violin was balanced against the opposite arm of the settee. I'd never noticed it before. From someone else's perspective, someone stood further away, the instrument was just an instrument. It made music. That was it. But from here, I could pick up on the tiny little details. Like how the neck had been chipped, how the strings were worn, how the chin rest was collecting minuscule particles.

The fragments in the air were storytellers. They could describe both the object and the owner instantaneously. But the tales they told were always sob stories. They always ended in negligence, or ignorance, or a deadly cacophony of the two.

The overenthusiastic bubbling of the kettle was a welcome distraction to my in-depth analysis of dead skin.

It was both alarming and impressive how much coffee one man could consume in the space of a few hours. It had only been an hour or so since his last cup, and that was just before he picked me up, brandishing a store-bought coffee worthy of at least 100 hipster points. But, as Sherlock was far too quick to inform me, the drink merely came into his possession due to the incredibly convenient location of the non-descript retailer, and nothing to do with the fact that he may or may not have gone out of his way to purchase this beverage, but goddamnit, Costa do good coffees, and I wasn't exactly in a position to judge his excessive consumption of caffeine.

It took Sherlock and I far too long to get to the point where we'd established where he was going to pick me up, let alone when. We'd meet at some point on Saturday; deciding that was the easy part. The specifics of the so-called 'date' were harder to arrange. We were treating it like a military operation, vocalising our thoughts through the phone as though they were walkie-talkies. I mean, I wouldn't have been entirely opposed to the idea of Sherlock arriving in an army uniform.

Convincing my mother I actually had friends to spend the weekend with for once was damn near impossible.

I told her Friday night, as she was curled up on the sofa, only half-watching some kind of crappy talent contest. Taking a seat next to her, I struggled to make my movements look casual. I could feel her watching me out the corner of her eyes as I feigned interest in the woman screeching - sorry, singing - on the telly.

To say this was a usual occurrence in our household would be lying; this never happened. In fact, before now there was more chance of every pig on the planet simultaneously sprouting wings and migrating to Antartica than there was my mum and I spending an evening together. Most stories depicted mother and child relationships to be the strongest bond in a family, but our relationship, or lack thereof, was enough to completely annihilate that stereotype.

As I felt the woman's attention drift back to the self-proclaimed 'talent' show, I stole a glance at her. In the darkness, only the flickering glow from the television illuminated her features. The iridescent lights danced off her cheeks and glinted off her weary eyes. Both her eyelashes and eyelids, not quite drooping but certainly lacking enthusiasm, cast a shadow over the bags under her eyes, stopping just at the tip of her ski-slope nose. I paused to contemplate how much of my own face resembled my mother's, and how much my dad's, because that had never bothered me previously.