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The sofa in the living room of 221B was still John’s favourite place to do it, despite it not being a very ergonomically sound location.
He loved the sleekness of the leather upholstery against his bare skin, and the way the entire room was bathed in warm sunlight on summer evenings like this one.
He ignored the awkward angle of his neck against the armrest of the sofa as he thrust his hips up towards Sherlock, who was moaning and panting on top of him, a picture of ecstasy. John deliberately kept the pace leisurely, a tad slower than both of them really desired, thus spiking said desire to even greater heights.
Sherlock’s torso was more or less upright, and he was leaning one elbow on the backrest of the sofa and the other one above John’s head, on the armrest nearest the window, as he pushed himself up and back down to meet John’s thrusts. The setting sun painted Sherlock’s shoulders in golden light, which sparkled in places from a sheen of sweat on his strikingly pale skin.
John was beside himself with lust.
Everything about Sherlock was delicious and beautiful. The way his chest heaved from exertion, the way he bit his plush lips in concentration, the way his arse entirely enveloped John’s cock with every delightful downward movement his lover made.
John sensed he was starting to get close, even though he never wanted this moment to end.
He gently wrapped his fingers around Sherlock’s cock and started stroking it in their rhythm, when Sherlock suddenly froze, his face going blank in alarm.
Then John heard it, too.
The soft creak of the door, accompanied by little footsteps.
“Daddy?” a small voice asked.
Oh My God.
Instant panic washed over John.
They had forgotten to lock the door.
John scrambled to cover himself, grabbing a cushion before stupidly realising his shirt was right next to him on the sofa.
Too late.
Only then did he become aware of Sherlock, who had swiftly stepped off the couch in his birthday suit, had walked over to Chloe and was calmly crouching down beside her, as if he weren’t totally stark naked.
“Hello, honey-bee. Couldn’t you sleep?” he asked, without a trace of tension in his voice.
“I did sleep, but then I woke up because I thought it was morning.” She looked from Sherlock to John and back with a deep frown on her face. “What were you doing? And why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”
“Ehm…” John began. His mind raced to come up with a cover story, some sort of excuse. On earlier similar occasions, he had claimed a medical examination, curing the hiccups, or, once, a competition in flexibility – but in all those cases, they had either still been partly dressed or covered with sheets.
This time, however, they had been in full view from where she was standing, and no plausible pretext came to mind, not even one to satisfy a five-year-old.
“We were making love,” Sherlock said.
John just stood there with his cushion and blinked, momentarily forgetting how to breathe, as Sherlock went on, in a patient and kind but matter-of-fact tone of voice, “Which means, we were doing things to each other’s bodies because we love one another, and because those things give us a nice feeling.”
Chloe’s frown hovered for a moment, before it deepened.
“What sort of things?” she then asked.
John panic-cringed internally. Surely Sherlock wasn’t going to…
“Well…” Sherlock cleared his throat, casting a glance at John, who could only stare back at him in blind terror. Then Sherlock continued, “Because we’re men, we both have penises. You might never have noticed before, but this is what men look like without clothes on.”
She giggled as she briefly looked them both over (though John was still holding the cushion in front of him), before averting her gaze again, and Sherlock smiled a soft smile at her.
John felt some of the awkwardness melt away, as he realised how this was the exact same giggle as when she’d seen a picture of a capybara or a porcupine for the first time, or when she’d heard tourists on the street speak Dutch the other day.
At her age, she was still encountering so many things on a daily basis that were strange and new, that this seemed to be just one more in a row of everyday revelations that adults constantly explained to her. Continuous little mysteries, like why you had to pay for a bus ticket, why some people begged for money on the streets, or why shops did not always sell everything at discounts. Why the sky was blue, why fish couldn’t breathe on land, why bees stung you if you stepped on them.
John and Sherlock always explained all such things as best as they could, not wanting to palm her off with overly simplified half-answers, like many other parents so often seemed to do. She deserved proper responses to her questions, they had agreed from the moment she’d started talking.
Then again, her current question was quite a different matter, to say the least.
After she had briefly glanced at Sherlock’s penis, which had thankfully long turned back to its usual shape by then, Sherlock went on, “And because I love your daddy very much, I’ve asked him to put his penis inside of me, and that’s what we were doing.”
Oh. My. God.
Sadly, this was not a good moment to smother Sherlock, or John would have.
“Because to me,” Sherlock continued pleasantly, “it’s the best feeling in the world when he does that.”
It sounded so simple, when he said it just like that.
“But they looked different just then,” she said. “Your peensies.”
Shit.
“Well observed, little Watson,” Sherlock said unperturbedly.
How on earth was Sherlock going to handle this part, then?
“Men’s penises can become bigger, and sort of… less floppy, which is to say, more firm, when they want to make love. Otherwise, it would be impossible to do so. Another lovely trick Nature has invented. Just like the guard cells of a plant’s stomates that become more or less rigid according to soil moisture, like we talked about yesterday, remember?”
She nodded, accepting the explanation without revulsion or fear.
John was awestruck.
Sherlock had simply told her, well, everything.
Or so he thought. Until she went on to ask, “But how do men do it who are married to a woman instead of a man? Or women who are married to women?”
John pressed his lips together.
Sherlock seemed unfazed. “Well, women usually don’t have a penis, but instead, they have a different sort of a tiny secret hole inside of them, which is called their vagina.”
“Really?” she asked, her eyes wide open.
“Yes. But remember, nobody ever needs to do anything with their penis or vagina if they don’t want to. Ever. But perhaps one day, when you’re grown up, and it should happen that you have come to like someone very much and they make you really happy, you might decide to make love with them. But only if you really want to.” Sherlock looked at her dead serious. “You have to remember that last bit, alright, that’s the most important part: only if you really want to.”
“Nah, I would never do that, that’s just weird,” she said with the same level of seriousness, wrinkling her little nose.
John chuckled. The tension had somewhat dissolved. “It’s normal for kids to find it weird,” he reassured her. “In fact, it would be weird if you didn’t find it weird.”
He heaved a big sigh, glad that they (or rather: Sherlock) had navigated this very tricky subject with relative success.
But Chloe had one more awkward question up her sleeve.
“So is that why you were making strange noises also?”
If John hadn’t wanted to disappear into a hole into the ground before, he was now wishing that the Grand Canyon would open up beneath him and swallow him whole.
She’d not only seen them, but heard them.
How was he ever going to look her in the eye again?
But Sherlock, his amazing Sherlock, instantly had another response ready. “You know the sound you might make when you’re eating your favourite chocolate cake and you’re really enjoying it, because it’s the best cake in the world?” Sherlock asked her. “That’s just the same noise you make when something feels really good in another part of your body, such as when you make love.”
“Or… when someone gives you a neck massage,” John added helpfully.
“Okay,” Chloe replied cheerfully.
Sherlock looked at John with a smug look on his face that seemed to say, See? It’s not that complicated.
Chloe yawned and suddenly seemed bored.
“Time to get back to bed, I think,” Sherlock said, and without any fuss at all she let herself be taken back to her room.
John remained on the sofa, dumbstruck, staring at the opposite wall unseeingly, in awe at how easily Sherlock had handled the situation. His factual, rational approach had really worked astonishingly well on an extremely delicate subject like this, which is so often considered taboo for anyone under eighteen, let alone little kids Chloe’s age.
Not two minutes later, Sherlock came back down again. His flaccid cock swung jauntily as he stepped back into the living room.
“She practically fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow,” he said.
“Incredible.” John shook his head, slowly starting to relax. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, you know, just explaining everything to her as it is. But she actually seemed satisfied with the answers you gave her, and took it like it was the most normal thing in the world!” John laughed properly, now he could see the humour in the situation.
“Well, it took me a while to realise, quite late in life,” Sherlock replied with a small smile, “but it is the most normal thing in the world, isn’t it?” He sat down next to John and put one arm around him.
“I rather think making love to you is the most extraordinary thing in the world,” John teased, and kissed him.
“So why did you decide to, you know, just tell her?” he then asked Sherlock, genuinely curious to know.
“Well. I realised that from her perspective, it probably looked like I was doing something absolutely nefarious to you, like, well, probably… probably like I was having a poo on top of you, and I didn’t want her to think that was the case.”
John almost choked on his own breath at that, before erupting in furious giggles that soon started to hurt his stomach. “Oh god, no. Oh no, god, no, no, no.”
Sherlock just smiled mildly at him, seeming to find John’s giggling fit almost more awkward than what happened ten minutes before.
“Yeah,” John admitted, slowly starting to get his breath back, “yeah, maybe it was for the better that you told her the truth.”
* * * * *
To John’s surprise and relief, Chloe didn’t bring up any of her newly gained knowledge the following day, or the one after that.
John kept being amazed at the fact that it clearly really hadn’t been that revolutionary to her.
On the third day, however, when she saw them kissing in the kitchen, she casually asked, “Oh, are you going to put your peensies inside of each other again?”
John felt himself go red as a tomato as Sherlock casually replied, “No time for that today, we still have to do the grocery shopping.”
John let out a hysteric snort, but Chloe was already changing the subject to the matter of the pink unicorn bag she really wanted for her birthday and whether Sherlock thought they still had it at Tesco’s.
Sherlock smiled an amused private smile at John, who was visibly trying to suppress another giggling fit at his daughter’s casual question.
A few days later, though, they realised Sherlock had omitted one vital thing in his explanations to Chloe.
Mycroft rarely dropped by at their flat, but one Wednesday afternoon, he was there, talking to Sherlock, when John arrived back home with Chloe after collecting her from school.
The door to the sitting room was open and they could hear them wrapping up their conversation just as he and Chloe arrived at the top of the stairs.
“Well, I’m sure Greg Lestrade will be delighted when you brief him on this,” Sherlock said to Mycroft.
“Over the moon, I’m sure,” Mycroft replied with a small smile, containing a healthy dose of irony.
“Hello Uncle Mycroft,” Chloe called, in her clear and cheerful voice, as she burst into the room. “It’s so nice of you that you are going to make Mr Lestrade happy! Will you be putting your peensie inside of him then also?”
Everyone froze.
In the mortified silence that followed, one could have heard the spiders above the kitchen cabinets procreate, had there been any doing so at that moment.
To John, the look on Mycroft’s face was worth the embarrassment, it was worth many moments of embarrassment, to see the depth of the shock he experienced behind that cold mask.