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The dressing room smelled of dust and old velvet and worn wigs, but Sherlock's gotten used to it quickly. He had even come to think of it as something close to home, which was a thought he filed away under things not to be examined too closely.
He dropped onto the chaise longue across from James, who was pulling off his fake moustache and still catching his breath from the run. The scene from earlier lingered in his mind, but it was already receding and packed into the part of his brain reserved for ongoing cases, making room for the present. That present being James, sitting in the chair opposite him, looking at him. He was fiddeling with one of the old prop crowns on the boudoir before he put it atop his head where it was resting lopsided on his curls.
After finishing his little monologue, James had a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth. That particular smile albeit mischievous meant he knew something, or was suspecting something.
Sherlock was looking at him, he'd been doing that more, lately. Looking. More than was strictly necessary for conversation, more than was defensible by any line of reasoning and societys standards. He'd noticed it in the past few days or rather he's simply stopped pretending his thoughts and eyes weren't going there. He knows something has shifted and in a strange way he knows that James feels this too. But he hadn't done anything further with that thought though, he was very good at blending stuff out.
Back in the present, James sitting there in the low gold light, his sleeves pushed up, holding up his bottle taking ocational sipps and smilling, had Sherlock finding it very difficult to look at anything else in the room.
"You fancy yourself a king?"
The words came out before he'd decided to say them. Blaming it on that damn crown which was somehow doing things to him. Even his voice was lighter than intended, warmer in an almost teasing —testing something, way.
James looked up and his smile changed, it shifted, becomming something more. His eyes, that dark brown which seemed to be endless, with the freckles surrounding the edges, had Sherlock spending an unreasonable and largely unacknowledged amount of time cataloguing it.
"If the crown fits." James responded with a smirk.
Sherlock stood up.
He hadn't decided to do that either.
One moment he was simply standing, and in the next he was moving, slowly, crossing the small distance between them with a deliberateness that felt like it belonged to someone braver than he generally considered himself. James went still in the chair, in the way he went still sometimes when he was paying very close attention. He was watching Sherlock come towards him as though the rest of the world had quietly ceased to be of any interest whatsoever.
When he finally came to a stop in front of him, Sherlock's heart was doing something he hadn't quite experienced before. The room completely silent. He reached out and lifted the crown from James's head. It was light, some cheap gilt over tin, a theatre prop, worth nothing. He let it fall to the side. Heard it clatter softly against the floorboards.
His hand came back and touched James's face.
At first just his palm, curved against his jaw, careful, like something that might break. For a moment James didn't move and didn't breathe, he noted. Sherlock could feel his own pulse in places he was not accustomed to feeling it.
And he was letting himself look. Properly. The line of James's jaw under his hand. The scatter of freckles across his cheeks, he knew them, he realised, he'd been mapping them without any conscious intention of doing so really and also the slight part of his lips. The way he was watching Sherlock with something carefully contained in his expression, like a man who on a mission not to move first but was finding that resolution more difficult.
Sherlock's thumb moved.
With a slow drift across his cheek following the aforementioned freckles, going down. Along the curve of his face until his thumb found the edge of James's lips and stopped there.
He slowly traced them, with the pad of his thumb. The soft give of the lower lip, the slight bow of the upper. In that moment he also became aware that he had stopped breathing and that James had gone even more devastatingly still beneath his hand.
James's lips parted. Like he knew without any signal where Sherlocks mind was taking him. Sherlock then pressed his thumb in, just slightly, just enough. A question with no words attached to it, silent.
James answered when he closed his mouth around it.
The first sensaition Sherlock noted was that it felt warm. interesting
This pondering was interuped by the faintest graze of tongue, it was barely anything, but just enough to be unmistakable —deliberate which concluded in Sherlock feeling it somewhere way down south, that it almost embarrassed him. He thought about the banality of the situation of being stood there in the half-dark with his thumb against James's tongue and his hand cradling his jaw yet something in his chest pulled so tight it was nearly unbearable.
He slowly withdrew his thumb, however he dragged the wet of it back across James's lips and watched them gleam in the low light.
Said gleam of them and the slight part of them, plus the way the light caught the wet and made them look....his mind searched for the word and landed somewhere entirely undignified —edible.
Like something placed in front of a man who had not realised until this moment how long he had been starving. His mouth actually watered and he could not stop looking at James's lips.
The thought that arrived in his head had no real logic behind it, it was more compulsion than anything else. It came over him with the force of something inevitable, something that had been building for days and perhaps even longer.
He had to taste them. That was all. It was not complicated. It was the least complicated thing he had felt in months.
So he leaned down. Searching for James's eyes, asking silently for permission, which he noted was giving by the slight uptick of a smile on his lips. The kiss was tentative at first, almost shy, which surprised him, since he hadn't previously considered James capable of shy. There was barely a pressure, it was more of a question, his lips against James's like something still a bit afraid of its own answer. However James answered it, but not with urgency, and surprisingly not with any of the asurety Sherlock has expected from him.
It was quiet and carefull, almost like someone who had been waiting a sufficiant amount of time and was in absolutely no hurry to rush the moment now that it was finally, finally here.
It didn't feel strange, and that was the thing that perplexed him, the complete and total absence of strangeness. He had half expected some internal turmoil, even some recoil, or some part of himself to come up with a logical objection. Instead there was only the sensation of long held tension releasing, of something slotting into place like the final puzzle piece.
James's hand found his waist.
This prompted Sherlock's other hand to move to cup his face with both hands, steadyly holding on while the kiss deepened. Their restraint being abandon quickly and becoming a thorough kiss. It was considerably more illuminating than anything Sherlock had previously filed under the category of kissing, he thought. At some time James made a quiet sound against his mouth and Sherlock made a private pact to spend whatever time was necessary learning how to produce that glorious sound again. Because now that he's taken a bite he can't stop eating.
After some time has past exploring James's mouth, fighting for a bit of dominance and clumsy teeth clattering which made them giggle momentarily, he became aware that he was hunched over quite severely, angled down at such an angle his spine was starting a complaint. Also James's neck was craned upward in a way that couldn't be comfortable he assumed, plus they had both stopped breathing some time ago.
So they broke apart.
Sherlock straightened up and James tilted his head back, eyes bright, lips still gleaming and now a bit red and swollen, breathing slightly faster than was his usual. He looked.....thoroughly kissed. Thoroughly and satisfyingly kissed, Sherlock noted a bit proud of himself.
After regaining his composure Sherlock looked at him again and all he saw reflected in James's gaze was that now there was nothing to pretend, no distance to maintain, no thoughts to file away under indecent. He felt something in his chest settle into place in that moment.
"The crown fits," Sherlock finally answered, which came out breathier than intended.
James blinked, confusion written all over his face but then he understood and his face did something unbeknownst, his smile that had started slow got bigger, unguarded, the one Sherlock was grateful to have witnessed privately a couple of times.
James stood up from the chair, still grinning, and looked at him with enormous fondness and in an almost assessing fashion which Sherlock found he did not mind at all.
"You," James said, "are a work in progress, sure to almost always discover new things of."
"Oh really....so that's what you think of me?" Sherlock chuckled.
"Yes."
Sherlock kissed him again, but it was more like kissing that smirk off his face. Less tentative this time, considerably more sure of himself and James stumbled back a half-step, and then they were both stumbling, a graceless tangle of limbs, kissing and giggling against each other's mouths until the backs of James's knees found the chaise longue where Sherlock had been sitting on previously, and tumbling down on it.
They layed there in their tangled mess, the light retreating to evening settings, foreheads nearly touching and catching their breath. basking
The case was still out there. Shou'an, the photograph, Hodge. All of it waiting patiently and inevitably.
But it can wait, this moment now was theirs, Sherlock thought.