Our first show in Paris goes well. Afterward spill out onto the pavement from the hot theatre and immediately prickle into gooseflesh, despite my bulky layers and the cap I’ve stretched over my locs. Somehow it takes the sound of her voice for me to quite be sure of what I’m seeing.
“Sherlock!” John calls, warm and joyful. She’s aglow in the halo of a streetlamp, but she darts out of it toward me. I hadn’t really known how hungry I was to look at her til I could glut myself again. Her bright eyes, her broad dimpled smile. I’ll never have my fill. John rushes up to me and stands before me, and we gaze at each other, both a little breathless and too happy to speak.
John breaks the silence first, holding out the bunch of plump red roses she’s had tucked under her arm, “These are for you.”
Take them and bury my face in them at once. They are hot house October roses, and they shouldn’t be sweet. But they are, “Thank you, John.”
“I missed you so much,” John’s voice is low and helpless and very quick, as if I might flicker out of existence before she’s said her piece.
“I missed you, too.” She hasn’t touched me yet.
“I have so much to tell you. Will you let me take you out to dinner?”
Brain is sort of slipping about on a scree of deductions so that it’s hard to think in a straight line, even harder to bring words to the surface. Her ring is gone. The engagement ring is gone. Try not to stare, try not to even glance. It’s weird to look. Is it? Isn’t it? How long have I been silent? Too long.
Excerpt from The Feeling and the Doing by me, apliddell! Get the rest of the story on AO3!
