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John finds himself thinking about Sherlock’s knickers far more often than he should these days.
It’s all the fault of the laundry, namely, that Sherlock never does it. John finally caved around the middle of March when he tired of the endless pencil skirts and black slacks and stylish button-up blouses littering the furniture and, with a long-suffering sigh, added Sherlock’s laundry to his own.
Sherlock, naturally, said not a word when John returned her freshly laundered, dried and folded clothes to her barring a curt nod of acknowledgement from where she sat scrolling through her emails at the table.
“You’re welcome,” John said with the added weight of a man dropping a heavy hint.
“Mm,” Sherlock hummed.
John paused for a moment, shook his head at himself, and started up the stairs.
“Considering the energy bill,” Sherlock called after him, “it’s hardly more cost-effective to take our clothes all the way to the laundry down the street. Might as well use Mrs. Hudson’s.”
John sighed and shut his door with a bang.
After that, Sherlock took to leaving most of her clothes in a pile outside her door rather than scattered about the flat. It was a sign of John’s concession to the state of things that he took this as a sign of courtesy. The second time he washed their clothes Sherlock was in one of her Moods, the sort in which she did little besides sulk on the sofa and make entirely unproductive trouble of the shooting-the-walls type. Needless to say, she barely acknowledged John’s presence, let alone the fact that he’d done her laundry again.
“You’re welcome,” John called as he trekked up the stairs to his room again, laptop in hand.
The mound of frustration known as Sherlock on the sofa deigned to honor John with an anguished grunt. It pleased him more than it should have.
The underthings didn’t appear until the third round of laundry. He discovered them as he was loading them into the machine (in Mrs. Hudson’s this time, but only because it was he didn’t fancy walking to the laundromat on the corner) and wondered briefly why he hadn’t encountered any earlier before deciding he didn’t want to know.
Sherlock wasn’t a satin g-string type of woman, which wasn’t at all surprising. She tended towards sensible hipsters and t-shirt bras in black, white, beige and gray, with only the barest surprising little touches of lace along the seams. She owned a few bras in other colors, all subtle: dark blue, sage green, and one a sort of grayish-lavender shade.
It shouldn’t have bothered him, really. John had a sister, after all, and he’d done her laundry more often than he should’ve. He even had a female flatmate while he was at uni that he’d worked out a laundry rota with. It wasn’t that they were Sherlock’s either, exactly, because Sherlock slept in nothing more than a t-shirt and underwear and all-around had little regard for modesty. He’d seen her in wide and varying states of undress (though not since he’d started doing the washing, he realized later) and though he definitely took note, he wasn’t by any means undone.
It was probably, John figured, as he tossed a bra into the laundry basket and tried to disregard the tingling in his belly, that when clothes were on Sherlock they gained some of her mystery and unattainability. One did not notice the soft trimmings of lace circling the legs of a pair of knickers, pretty but practical, when there was Sherlock to look at. Once they were removed from her, they were vulnerable.
John smiled ruefully at the thought and stacked his shirts on top of the layer of Sherlock’s underthings. His therapist would have a field day.
In the shower later, after he came with a shudder and a muffled shout, he decided that there were things Sherlock Holmes did not, could not and should not ever know about.
It didn’t stop him getting rock-hard every time he folded a pair of off-white knickers and imagined Sherlock slipping them on, picturing the very fabric that he was holding rubbing up between her legs as she ran down the street.
As time went by, John built a mental library of images of Sherlock Holmes in her underthings. He found himself flipping through them at the most inopportune moments, like when she bent over at a crime scene and her shirt slipped to reveal a bra strap. He would catch himself staring at her legs, trying to extrapolate from the panty lines at the tops of her thighs and the color of her skirt which knickers she had on. John Watson became the Sherlock Holmes of lingerie. He could tell by the way she stretched whether she was wearing the beige bra that fit her perfectly and gave her full coverage or the blue one that didn’t quite fit but had just the littlest bit of padding, or know whether she had on the black lacy panties or the white by how tight and how pale her trousers were.
A few weeks after the underwear-washing began, John and Sherlock were at Scotland Yard. They were flipping through surreptitiously taken photographs of a prostitute. She had been the last person seen with a man who had been discovered tied to the bottom of a double-decker tour bus. Lestrade peered over their shoulders, supervising as always.
Sherlock tapped the computer screen on one photo of the woman in a business suit. “Was this taken after she saw the victim?”
“Just after she left the hotel.”
“She couldn’t have been seeing him as a client, that much is obvious.”
Sherlock and Lestrade both turned to stare at John.
“Well, she’s got that ridiculous line where her underwear ends,” he said, pointing. “Isn’t it a bit unsuitable for a working woman to be wearing granny panties on the job?”
Lestrade shrugged. “Makes sense,” he said, and returned to squinting at the computer screen.
Sherlock was a moment longer staring at John.
The cab ride home was completely silent. Sherlock passed the time biting her thumbnail and looking intensely thoughtful. John passed it sneaking sideways glances at Sherlock.
Sherlock fumbled with the key to the flat and almost dropped it. John laughed, a bit too high and nervous. She huffed, flung the door open, and was inside in an instant.
The moment the door shut, she dropped her coat to the floor and stripped off her gloves, looking at John as if she were seeing him for the first time.
“Take off your coat,” she said in a low voice.
“That was the plan, yes,” John said slowly, hanging his coat on the rack by the fireplace.
She crossed the room in three long strides, seized him by the shoulders and shoved him against the door. John grabbed her elbows reflexively and tried to push her back. She didn’t budge.
“What the hell--”
“You are daft sometimes,” Sherlock breathed. “God, I was daft. You’ve been looking. You’ve been watching.”
John stopped struggling.
“You’ve been showering for an average of four minutes longer,” she said, rubbing her thumbs back and forth over his wrists as if she couldn’t stop herself.
John groaned. “I should have realized. Having me wash your knickers? Practically Sherlock Holmes’s version of throwing herself naked onto my bed.”
“On the contrary.” She took the tiniest step forward, placing her feet on either side of John’s. “If you wanted me to throw myself naked onto your bed, all you had to do was ask.”
John sighed. “Oh God, yes.”
She kissed him. Sherlock was a good five inches taller than John, six in her low black heels, and he had to crane his neck up to meet her lips. She released his wrists, because with both hands she could slip her fingers up his jumper and feel his ribcage. He, in turn, ran one hand round her waist and the other up the back of her thigh, under her pencil skirt and squeezed.
Sherlock laughed against his mouth, husky and low. “Tell me what underwear I’ve got on,” she whispered.
John shivered. “The green bra that’s a tiny bit too large on you and the black knickers that match an entirely different bra.”
Sherlock’s eyelids twitched. “Tell me why.”
“You don’t move as quickly in that bra, I think,” John said slowly. Sherlock was unbuttoning her blouse. It was like watching a train wreck. “Not as much support.”
She laughed again. “Don’t stop. I know there’s more.”
He swallowed. “You like the black knickers. Wear them the most, but only with that skirt, because your other ones leave lines and the black ones show under your lighter clothes.”
“Yes,” she sighed, tossing her shirt to the floor.
Sometime after John tugged those black knickers down Sherlock’s legs with his teeth and before Sherlock set to work probing every inch of his body with those long, dextrous, gorgeous violinist’s fingers John realized that he had terribly misjudged Sherlock’s sexual experience. He did not say so until she had him pinned to his bed, throwing her head back as she sunk down onto his cock.
“You’re a menace,” he choked out, squeezing her thighs. “A bloody sexual predator.”
Sherlock grinned, rolled her hips (John gasped), and bent at the waist until they were nose-to-nose. “I prefer to think of myself as searching for a thorough--ahh, do that again and I will give you such a bite--a thorough human experience.” She nipped at his earlobe. “You can’t be surprised that I would want to know everything.”
“Move before I kill you,” John hissed. “You don’t consider this...unnecessary?”
Sherlock gripped the headboard for leverage and moved. John made a noise that defied most definitions. “A lady has her vices,” she panted, and began to ride him in earnest.
They spent the rest of the night cataloging every square inch of each others’ bodies. Sherlock tied John to the bed, tasted the scar on his shoulder, and sucked him off while he described every fantasy he’d ever had about her. John pushed her onto the dresser and went knuckles-deep inside her, lips and tongue working at her clit as she writhed and squeezed her thighs around his head. They shouted like porn stars until the neighbors started banging on the wall, and then they tried coming in total silence.
At two in the morning, John was lying spread-eagled on the bed with Sherlock curled up against him, one leg wrapped possessively around his waist and one hand tracing patterns on his chest.
“Why was it that you didn’t have me wash your underwear that first week?” John said, still slightly suspecting he didn’t want to know.
“Didn’t want to frighten you off. Lacked the data. Didn’t know how you’d react,” she said drowsily into his shoulder.
“So...eyeballs, human skulls, heads in the refrigerator, shooting the walls, that won’t scare the new flatmate away, oh no, but throwing your knickers into the wash? He’ll run for the hills.”
“And I was menstruating that week. Usually just throw them away after. Too much of a bother.”
John clapped a hand to his forehead. “Yep. Didn’t want to know.”
Sherlock bit the fleshy part of his neck below his ear. “You’re welcome.”
“Er, thank you, I suppose,” John said, and held her until they fell asleep.