Read Online Murder with Lens: A Sherlock Holmes Case (221B Baker Street Series) by S.K. Lloyds - Free Book Online

trained to use deductive reasoning in America,” John set the cup of tea down beside his flatmate’s left hand. “There isn’t anyone else like you.” It was because Sherlock never gave his internal mechanisms a second thought – beyond being able to think properly to begin with – that he was having trouble with his slippery identity.
    Sherlock sucked a deep breath and exhaled. He picked up his tea mechanically. He didn’t want tea. John had made it for him. John was trying to help. He blew on it and sipped. The familiarity of the activity took hold of him.
    “You want to talk to her,” John sat across from him. “Why don’t you just do that?”
    “Because I can’t just talk to her,” Sherlock sipped again. Colour bled into his lips. Heat.
    “I just talk to you.” John pointed out.
    “You aren’t,” Sherlock gestured in air, “one of them.”
    “Us.” John corrected him. “When you say it, it should be, ‘you aren’t one of us’, Sherlock. Reese gets that much about this right. Now, I get that you hate being treated like you’re this incomparable phenomenon type thing, but there it is. That is what you are. Your coping skills are for dealing with the people she calls apes and suits, I mean, right or wrong, so, yeah, you’re going to be a bit out of your depth with her. Relax. I honestly admired what you told her back there.” It didn’t help matters that she was a young woman. He avoided those.
    “A bit out of my depth?” Holmes said slowly. He shook his head, unable to calculate.
    “She’s grown up with people just like her. You have to understand the insular mentality. She expects you to think like them. You’re throwing her curve balls she’d never expect out of one of you. I think that has her feeling betrayed.” John looked at the fire. “And you’ve been isolated. You don’t know any better. I don’t suppose you thought what it would be like to meet someone else like you.”
    “Mycroft is like me, and I don’t know how we manage to breathe the same air.” Sherlock said.
    After consideration, John realized he didn’t consider Mycroft to be very like Sherlock at all. John didn’t bother saying so, but he knew where his loyalties lay. But there was one thing he was starting to recognize. “You thought it would be easy. Like something would click, and there you’d be.”
    Sherlock set down his cup. “I had hoped.” He shut his eyes and actually seemed to drift off in the firelight as John finished his tea. Then he sighed. “I have to learn her system. Work her system.”
    John grinned. “Yes you do. It never just clicks, mate.”
    “It does, John.” Sherlock didn’t bother to open his eyes. “It did with you.”
    That knocked whatever John had been about to say out of his head. For a long time, John watched the fire draw shadows on Sherlock. What had happened to him tonight, well, Sherlock Holmes, in his unapproachable way, was crestfallen. But he’d worked out that he wasn’t alone. It wasn’t precisely a chummy man hug, or chuck on the shoulder, but, unless John had missed his guess, Sherlock had just called him a friend.
    John finished his cup and stretched to soak up the fire.
    ***
    The phone rang at 5:30 AM.
    Sherlock’s cell. Holmes was out of his chair and on it before John had really come awake enough to realize he’d knocked his empty tea-mug to the floor during the last few hours.
    Sherlock was taking off his shirt over his head on the way into his room. “Excellent. Hanging up now. Things to do.” He chucked his phone on the bed. The shower cut on before John had even stood up.
    John was a little slower to stir, in fact, and stumbled aimlessly for the coffee maker before diverting back to get his cup. He accomplished neither.
    Sherlock’s phone began to ring again. John walked in his flatmate’s room and picked it up just to stop the bleating noise.
    “Don’t hang up on me, Sherlock. It’s bad manners, for one thing, and-”
    “Lestrade,”