holmes_minor | Fic: Forbidden Fruit: Teen (Reply)

Title: Forbidden Fruit
Rating: Teen
Length: 500
Content Notes: Pining Holmes, inspired by the Bible
Summary: Holmes is distracted by an apple.
Author's Note: for the monthly prompt: temptations
“But I am not a yeoman farmer!”

My cry was the oft repeated lament when clients compensated me with goods rather than currency.

Watson gripped the heavy sack of apples and headed downstairs with a chuckle and a mumbled jest which compared me, rather unfavourably, to a harvester’s ladder.

I returned to my attention to the experiment before me, and by the time the quest for truth released its grip on me once more, I was being serenaded by Watson’s snores. One of Clark Russell’s finest sea stories was about to plunge from his lap to the rug and one of the fruits—the choicest, going by its beauty—of my latest fee was tucked beside him in his armchair.

A loud snort produced a moment of breathlessness in my companion, which was sufficiently disturbing to wake him. He muttered to himself, then grunted happily at the apple’s discovery.

I fought the urge to smile as his teeth sliced into the fruit; its flavour was, apparently, as inviting as its appearance based on the grunts that followed.

I made a lengthy, absurd notation in my note-book and observed Watson out of the corner of my eye. Red skin became white flesh as he bit the fruit, and my thoughts wandered from the quest for truth to how, were Watson’s teeth to sink into my shoulder ridge, at, say a moment of crisis, they might well turn exposed pale flesh back to redness. And how might I welcome that return, there and other places...

No!

I shook my head as if to physically expel the wicked image, then quickly scratched at the page.

The noises that accompanied Watson’s enjoyment of the apple, however, continued to distract, more so the flutter of a white handkerchief ridding his mouth of its wet sweetness, its sweet wetness, its…

…oh, my mouth might be sweet, wet, too. He and I could sweeten, dampen each other in so many ways…

No!

I twisted abruptly in my chair, but, alas, throwing Watson’s armchair picnic out of my sight did not drive him from my thoughts.

What would he taste like? Hard, then yielding.

No!

The apple, then. What would the apple taste like?

It would taste like any apple, obviously, any ripe, handsome, eye-catching, swollen, plump, wholly-satisfying…

“Oh, for goodness sake!” I cried and sprang from my chair, closing the distance between us with one stride, then snatching the fruit from Watson’s hand.

I bit, then chewed.

Masticated, the fruit sat in my mouth like warm paste and the colour of my skin must certainly have approximated its rosy hue as I realised what I had done.

I stared at Watson, aghast.

He, however, laughed.

And laughed and laughed until he wheezed. Then nearly doubled-over, he pointed to the apple, a twin of the one in my hand, which was perched on the edge of the table whereupon my experiment lay.

He rose and thumped me on the back, saying,

“Forbidden fruit’s always sweeter, my good man!”