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Sherlock rolls espresso round his mouth, much the same way Mycroft might with a good whisky. He filters it through his teeth, lets it slide over his tongue and down his throat, and jots a few things down on a notepad.
Kenyan peaberry: Strawb notes. Poss blend – strawb/acid + bitter/sweet.
He taps the pen to his lower lip, takes another sip of the espresso, allowing himself a little sigh of pleasure. If this is just the sampler, the final roast is going to be exquisite. He strokes the roaster fondly, strolls out into the main shop where the new barista is getting to grips with the machine. Sherlock doesn’t know much about him, just that he’s a PhD student at Bart’s. Maybe he has access to the lab equipment; that’s something to ask about later.
For the inexperienced, the machine is a bit of a puzzle, but John clearly knows what he’s doing. He expertly grinds and tamps, tapping out the seconds on his wrist as the espresso pours, and testing it for acidity with a quick slip of pink tongue before adjusting the grind. Sherlock approves. He moves a little closer, scents the air like a well-bred cat. Sherlock’s Jansoon blend. Aftershave (Paul Smith. A gift; doesn’t entirely suit him). Salt. He senses he’s got a little too close when John starts at their sudden proximity and jumps aside, flushing.
“Oh, morning Sherlock. Something smells good.”
“I know. New blend. I’ll be working on it today. You’re in on your own?”
“No, Greg’s in. I’m just early.”
Sherlock checks his watch. Only seven thirty. He’s been here since five, woke up with a formula for the perfect roast in his head and had to come to the shop.
“Fancy a coffee?” John’s finally got the pour of his espresso right, the crema is thick and golden and it hits the balance between acidity and bitterness perfectly.
“Mm,” Sherlock closes his eyes, “This is just the Jansoon?”
John gives him a dazzling smile, “Yeah. Is it alright?”
“Excellent.” Sherlock drains it, watching as John cleans out the baskets meticulously with a practiced flick of his wrist. The scent of him clings to the back of Sherlock’s throat all morning.
-
Mid-afternoon, and he’s finished the first roast of the peaberry. He’s sweltering hot from hanging around the roaster taking notes, and he’s stripped to his shirtsleeves, hair stuck in stripes to his forehead. The shop has a few customers; some on laptops, some sipping coffee, others browsing the bags of beans, all of which have ‘Roasted by Sherlock’ scrawled messily on the label. About six months ago, they were ‘Roasted by Maggie’ and they were selling about half as much as they do now.
As a final year chemistry student, Sherlock had been loathe to find employment. With Mycroft withholding his funds like the fat spider he was though, he’d had to resort to part time work to keep up the rent on his Montague Street flat. Within half an hour at his new job, he’d exposed an affair, revealed a nascent masochistic kink in a slick looking businessman and made the roaster cry by pointing out the (many) flaws in her most recent blend. Instead of kicking him straight out of the door, Lestrade had shoved him through the back amongst the beans and told him to get on with it. It had taken him the rest of the afternoon to get to grips with the roaster, and suddenly he had a job.
Sherlock dreams in beans. His flat is wallpapered with roasting graphs (annotated until they’re practically unreadable in spidery handwriting), making it look like the office of some sort of Coffee PI. His kitchen is mostly taken over by an enormous homemade cold drip machine, which he uses for a control in his experiments into aromatic extraction. Wafts of vanilla, bergamot and delicate jasmine make his head spin, and he coaxes them from the beans with a patience that even he hadn’t known he’d possessed.
He’d had no idea how perfect this job was for him when he’d started it; it’s science: chemistry, volatiles and reactions, but it’s also an art. His palate is honed to the tiniest hints of lilac, sweet pea, and once roasted: caramel, chocolate, dark bitter nuts. He can see them like colours; just a touch more bitterness here, a little more sweetness there, the aromas harmonising flawlessly. He could take days extracting the perfect sweet note of lemon from a Yellow Bourbon and not be bored.
He spends an idle two minutes watching a bead of sweat run prickling down the back of John’s neck, and contemplates roasting a blend to flawlessly complement being sucked from the hollows of his hipbones. Caramel notes, to balance the salt of his skin. Who knows what other flavours might reside there, though. His mouth waters.
Lestrade knows better than to try and disturb him for a matter so inconsequential as the shop closing, so by the time he thinks to take a break it’s past seven in the evening. He tries to remember if he’s eaten today. Probably not; roasting days usually pass by without him acknowledging that the world exists, never mind trivialities like food. He sweeps his sweaty hair off his face and pads into the shop, where he can hear someone clattering about. John is starting to clean the machines, humming as he sweeps coffee from the grinder.
Sherlock watches with narrowed eyes as he meticulously cleans the machine. By the time he’s finished, it’s gleaming like new; John turns around with a sly grin, like he knows he’s just passed a test. There’s nothing worse than a barista who doesn’t respect the machine, who’ll over or under extract all the beautiful delicate flavours that Sherlock has coaxed out of the beans.
“Heading home?” John asks. “Or do you just sleep with the roaster?”
Sherlock gives a reluctant smile, “I’m going home. I have an experiment in progress; it needs documenting.”
He reaches into the fridge to take a croissant left over from the morning and eats it in three bites, watching out of the corner of his eye as John follows the path of a stray flake of pastry down onto his bottom lip. Sherlock slides his tongue out slowly to pick it up. John looks away.
-
When he gets home that evening, he tapes a piece of lined paper to his mirror and writes in precise cursive:
John
medium (sweet)
pentanedione
damascenone
furanone
vanillin
buttery honey, caramel (the curve of his neck would taste like burnt sugar)
He surveys the plethora of graphs, runs a long finger over the arc of a dark-roasted Arabica. More data needed.
-
Every morning he catalogues. He wants to distill the very scent of John’s skin, his hair, his sweat.
A day comes when John stops wearing aftershave and Sherlock almost gives in to the temptation to lean in and run a curious tongue up and over the back of his neck, now free of foreign scent. He resists, leaning close instead to murmur a greeting into his ear, shivering as John turns to say hello in a delicious drift of bittersweet salt.
In addition to his everyday roasts, he begins on a small batch of Blue Mountain; another peaberry. He asks John to give his opinion on the sample, scenting the little pile of beans as they’re cradled in John’s palm with a minute flutter of his eyelashes.
The roast is adjusted: a little more bitterness, less acidity; the skin of John’s palms would taste warm, musky.
“This one smells lovely,” John says, poking his head into the roasting room when Sherlock is at the final stage. “Am I allowed a taste when it’s done?”
“Yes,” says Sherlock, dizzy.
When he finishes it, he resists pressing his face into the pile of beans and inhaling greedily. It’s past seven again when he leaves the back room with a small bag; John is still there, sweeping out the grinder with long strokes of a soft brush.
“I have something for you.”
John turns, mouth parting on a greeting, and Sherlock presses the bag into his hands.
“I--”
“It’s yours,” Sherlock says, “open it.”
John’s fingers fumble with the tie a little. He looks up, uncertain.
“Should I--?”
“Yes.”
He pours the beans into the clean grinder. The scent of them permeates the air.
John’s actions are slow, deliberate. The abrasive grind of the beans, aroma clouding up from the grinder; the smooth line of his finger as he sweeps grains of coffee from the basket, the twist of his shoulder, the slip of his tongue as the test pours. Too quick; he adjusts the grind. Sherlock vibrates with anticipation.
The next pour comes out perfectly. Sherlock leans in, just a little.
John’s tongue darts out along the rim of the cup. His eyes are fixed on Sherlock, wary?
“Go on,” Sherlock encourages. John sips.
A sigh, a lowering of eyelids, lips curling up. He puts the half-empty cup down momentarily.
Sherlock could be said to be many things, but coy isn’t one of them. He moves forward in a controlled rush, backs John against the countertop and bends down, inhaling long and deep along the column of his throat with a barely repressed shudder. He waits a beat, hovering with his nose almost pressed into John’s collarbone, watching the movement of his throat as he swallows. After a second, John releases a slow, shuddering breath.
“Are you smelling me?”
“Yes,” says Sherlock, “I’d like to suck espresso off your stomach.”
There’s an audible hitch in John’s breathing. He doesn’t say anything, or move.
“You,” he scents along the curve of John’s jaw, “you favoured a medium roast.” He runs a daring hand up over the nape of John’s neck, feels the hairs there as they stand on end at his touch.
“Caramel,” he murmurs, “for the salt,” and suddenly John has wrenched his head around and is kissing him, tongue sliding against his and his mouth tastes of, of--
Sherlock’s head is spinning. He’s kissing John and John is moaning desperately against him and all Sherlock can do is breathe the scent of him and open his mouth and taste and suck on his tongue and God, it’s so much. He can’t even begin to catalogue everything and suddenly he doesn’t care, just wants to breathe it all in until he suffocates in it. He smears his mouth over John’s jaw, sucks at the soft lobe of his ear, drags his tongue tremulous down the taut line of his throat. John’s breath comes in pants.
“Jesus Christ, Sherlock. How long--?”
“I had to wait,” says Sherlock. He shoves John’s t-shirt up, pushes him backwards onto the top of the counter. John’s stomach is shivering, prickled with goosebumps, and Sherlock delicately pours the remains of the still-warm espresso onto it.
“I had to wait for this.”
John’s head falls back against the countertop. The coffee pools in the smooth concave curve of his belly and Sherlock leans forward, a hand on each of John’s hips to hold him still as he traces his tongue through it.
“Oh, fuck.”
Sherlock’s tongue trembles against John’s skin. The taste is more exquisite than anything he could have imagined; salt, musk, sweet toasted nuts, buttery honey and caramel, the familiar bitter acidity. He groans into John’s belly, laps up the last of it greedily and then John is sliding off the countertop and pulling Sherlock against him and gasping into his mouth.
“I’ve been cataloguing you,” Sherlock says, quiet against his lips, “the smell of your skin--” he cuts off with a groan as John’s hands slide round to grab hold of him and pull their hips together.
“I want to know what it tastes like on, on--” John bites his neck lightly, thrusts forward and Sherlock loses his train of thought a little, “on, God, all of you.”
John pants, squirming against him desperately and drags Sherlock’s head down again and then he’s tasting John and espresso and John is shoving his hand into Sherlock’s trousers and unbuttoning his own jeans and then it’s hot damp skin against hot damp skin and in two, three short thrusts Sherlock is coming exultantly all over John’s hand, his stomach, his cock. John whines, shivers. Sherlock palms the base of his cock, drags one finger softly up the crease of his thigh and licks into his mouth gently and John jerks and stutters against him with a moan and everything is suddenly warm and very slippery between them.
John presses his forehead against Sherlock’s, breathing heavily. Sherlock can’t resist moving his head to the side and pressing his nose luxuriously into John’s hair. He’s trembling, oversensitive, and he can’t hold in a little moan as he darts his tongue out for a taste.
“You can, if you like.” John’s moved his head back, is looking at him intently. “I’d like you to. Pour it all over me and lick it off.” His tongue slides out nervously. Sherlock would like to suck on it.
“I have a grinder at home,” Sherlock murmurs, “and a cafetière.”
-
Later, Sherlock spreads John out on his kitchen table, feeling hungry in a way he never does for food. Coffee pools on the table, staining the wood beautifully and dripping to the floor as the two of them move slowly against each other. The cafetière lies forgotten on the counter.