Author's note: I highly recommend reading my fic 'The Irene Adler Files' before this one, or most of the details in this story just won't make sense.

This is PWP. Yep, it's sex, all of it. I have to warn you, it might be too slow because I put too much thought into it. I'm not the greatest smut writer ever and I might have gotten a couple of details wrong, feel free to point out if I did. I hope you enjoy!

He looks up at her, and he knows he must look quite ridiculous because he's spread on his back with his head resting on the pillows. Fortunately for him and his position there's nobody watching them. He doesn't need any footage to remember any of this anyway. Quite the contrary, there's nothing that could keep him from not remembering. His experiences might tease him in his dreams which he tries too hard to forget. Those dreams are an unnecessary bodily function which makes him remember that the mind is capable of playing tricks on him.

He already had the opportunity to watch her, taste her, and feel her before she pulled his hair to distract him, and swiftly switched their positions.

And now she's settled just below his waist, just below his condom covered cock. He knows she's on birth control – she's never told him explicitly, but he knows. She takes many risks in her life, perhaps too many, but in situations like this she will never even think of taking a risk.

Makes sure that sex is safe.

She looks down at him, cocking her head to the left with an unasked question on her lips, and he nods, knowing what she is asking for.

Will always ask for consent.

He knows that statement now needs an addition, "if a mutual understanding exists, this might happen through nonverbal communication."

He sees the way her body seems to tower above him now she has guided him inside her. His body automatically pushes up to meet her, but she keeps him from moving by pushing him down with both her hips and her arms on his shoulders. She bends her body towards him as far as she possibly can, creating some kind of friction but not enough to be of importance to either one of them. Her face is a couple of inches away from his, her hands still on his shoulders.

Assumes dominance. Always.

She hasn't tied him down, she hasn't even tried to, because she's aware that he wouldn't like to be completely out of control. She would do it in an instant if he allowed it, and even though he isn't averse to experimenting, the kind of experiments he has on his mind are of a slightly different and milder kind. She knows what he likes, and what he definitely doesn't like.

As she starts moving, grinding her hips circular motions against him, calculated but not too intense just yet, even though the feeling is enough to make him want to remove his shoulders from her grasp and reverse the roles somehow, but he knows she wouldn't let him do that so easily.

She leans in even further, putting her mouth against the skin of his neck. He knows that she knows that his right side is the most sensitive, and the feeling of her tongue leaving wet patches on his skin goes straight to his groin. A groan escapes him, and he knows that she most definitely beats him when it comes to holding back any kind of sounds. This is not something he's proud of, but then she had already damaged his pride and before this day.

She leans back into her original position, her back slightly curved and a rather triumphant look on her face. Every move she makes is deliberately sensual, but it doesn't matter all that much; he doesn't necessarily care about that, although he has to admit that makes for an interesting observation of human behavior.

He manages to surprise her when he manages to sit up, his hands settling on her back to prevent her from falling backwards. He feels her spine and muscles move underneath his fingertips, and when he's managed to sit up, she kisses him quickly.

"Hmm, I gather you learned a new move, Mister Holmes" she says teasingly. He doesn't even need to hear her tone to know that she's mocking him, her vocabulary tells him enough: she has stopped calling him "Mister Holmes" in everyday situations quite some time ago.

He decides not to reply. He leans closer instead, his hands still settled on her back, her breasts pressed against his chest.

He manages to change the direction of their bodies ninety degrees, and the result is that they're no longer covering the length of the bed but rather the width when he pushes her back onto the mattress. She clings onto his body to make sure the connection between their bodies stays intact, taking him down with her. His body hits hers harder than might be comfortable, but he doubts she notices it.

He expects her to take some kind of action, but she lays surprisingly still on her back, waiting for him to make the next move. Perhaps she's saving it all for later, but he has almost given up predicting what she might do next, not just now but outside her bedroom as well. He tries, but finds himself failing more often than not.

A strand of her hair is sticking to her lips, so he brushes it away, surprising both of them with the tenderness of the gesture. He traces her bottom lip with his thumb, noticing how her front teeth have left an impression in the flesh.

Bites bottom lip to keep from making noises.

Making sure that his body covering hers in the most important places, he starts moving in and out of her again, keeping his pace slow and even. He buries his face in the crook of her neck, marking the texture of her skin with his lips. He takes in the scent of her almost but not quite faded perfume.

Perfume is unmistakably still Chanel No. 5, but she has recently started to use a new body lotion.

The sudden sigh that comes out of her mouth resembles one of annoyance rather than pleasure, and he almost but not quite starts to doubt himself and his actions. Sex is something that is still rather foreign to him, even though he has proved to be a relatively quick learner.

He feels her hands leaving his back and moving to clasp around his face. She pulls his face away from her neck, and she looks up at him and he can see something that looks like disappointment in her expression.

"Sherlock, I can almost hear you thinking," she hisses, "you're inside of me. I know it must be difficult, but could you please stop thinking for a moment?"

He stares down at her, his motions momentarily restrained by the firm grasp of her hands. At that moment he realizes the gears in his mind have stopped turning, but he knows this moment of clearness might not last very long. He manages to nod, and Irene releases his head.

"Good," she says, and she moves her hips against his. A groan escapes him, but her movements only manage to distract him for a short moment. He can't afford to get distracted like this, and he knows it's futile to tell himself not to get distracted at all, but it can't happen this early, not yet.

He needs to take his time to take in the biology of her, to draw a map of her skin with his mouth and fingers, he needs to take in the way her body reacts to his touches, and the way she her body comes into contact with his in all possible places, the feeling of her quite literally being enveloped around him. He feels obliged to mark the flaws of her skin, the randomness of her freckles, the contrast between her skin and her scars of various origins. He knows that some of those deserved to be called her "battle scars", because he knows where they came from in the first place and he feels a rare sense of pride because he's privileged enough to name them as such.

He can feel the skin of her back getting damp when he tries to lift her into a slightly different angle. The sheets are starting to stick to her body, but at that moment she feels almost weightless to him. He knows it's scientifically impossible regarding the circumstances, but somehow this trivial thought has made its way into his mind and he knows it's there to stay for the time being. He'll delete it after they're done. Or the day after they're done. Or the week.

He feels the need to memorize which ministrations cause the difference between her biting her lip or moaning.

Right side of neck proves most effective for making her sigh when mouth touches skin.

He contently adds this finding to his mental catalogue of her. He can almost hear her berating voice, but he just can't stop thinking. Quite the contrary, he can't stop taking in all the details, and his brain simply starts to go into overdrive.

His thoughts become louder and louder, until the science of her becomes too loud, like it's a shout inside of him that needs to get out, and his observations become words on his lips that spill onto her skin.

"Added tongue most likely results in soft moan," he whispers against her neck.

He can feel her freeze against him, and he does the same. The only noises filling the room are the sounds of their breathing, his slightly louder than hers, because he can tell that she's keeping hers back.

"Holds back her breath and words when she realizes I'm talking," he says, and he pulls back, resting most of his weight on his arms.

"Sherlock," she says, the breath she had been holding finally coming out of her mouth together with his name.

"Bad?" he manages to ask.

"No, no," she says and smiles with the wicked smile he has seen on her face before, but this time it's mixed with something else, some kind of understanding, as though her mind has worked something out. It softens her features for a second.

"It's – good. Very good," she says, and he realizes it's the arousal in her voice that's making it sound so differently. He wonders why it took him more than a second to notice.

She's enjoying this.

"Loves being observed," he says, matter-of-factly.

To her the verbalization of his observations must sound like the equivalent of filthy talk, a thing which she probably never expected him to pull off.

"I thought you were distracted by…other things, but you're actually thinking about me. I'm flattered," she says, and he can feel her sarcastic laughter vibrating from her chest.

He knows she mirrors the words she told him the day they first met. His answer back then had been quite resolute, and he hadn't felt a single pang of doubt or regret upon saying those words.

"You should be," he says, and he can almost hear her mentally shake her head at his words.

"Oh, you stupid," she says and kisses him, "stupid," she kisses him again, "man."

She buries her hands in his hair and manages to move her legs, folding them around his arse and changing the angle slightly to urge him to keep moving. He quickly picks up the pace, and he kisses her sloppily. He doesn't focus on her mouth but on all the parts of her he can reach. Her chin, her cheekbones, the curve of her neck when she bends back her head to give him better access. In the intervals between the kisses he whispers the scientific names of her skeletal structure in the places he touches with his lips.

She simply listens, her breathing pattern becoming more ragged as his thrusts become faster, and she keeps up with his pace, trying to come up to him to match his movements.

"Her breathing pattern becomes increasingly irregular as contact prolongs," he says against her mouth, simply recalling one of the items stored away in his mind palace.

He needs to put effort into keeping his eyes open. He notices that her eyes are closed, and he takes some strange sense of pride in this fact.

"She keeps her eyes open and focused," he says, his now altered breathing pattern and voice making it impossible to complete his sentence in one go, "unless bodily sensations get too overwhelming."

He sees her biting her lip harder than she has done before, and he feels her nails digging into his scalp. He rests of his weight on his left arm, then moves his hand close to the junction of their bodies, his fingers brushing against her clitoris. He knows her left side is the most sensitive, so he makes sure that side gets ample attention.

"Needs," he fails to say more than one word at once, "clitoral," he breathes out, "stimulation."

"Oh god," she says, or whispers, or perhaps she moans it out loud, but the blood is whizzing in his ears and it blocks out most of the external sounds.

He knows that she has given up on trying to keep back any kind of noises, and he can most definitely distinguish her moans that grow loader with each movement of his fingers and his hips. Her physical signs tell him that she's close. He knows his own orgasm isn't far away either, but he has to keep her in sight.

Her moans consist of words that he cannot hear or remember, however hard he tries. Despite the nonexistent eloquence of her words he can hear something overwhelmed as well as frustrated in her tone, he simply fails to distinguish what she says. It's as though his own vocals and hers have become one blurry mess of syllables, no longer expressing words.

Her body tenses and her nails dig into his skin, and he knows there will be red and purple colored marks on the back of his neck and down his back the next morning. His experiments regarding the similarities between his text alert and her actual climax noise had already proved to be positive, but this time it's louder and lasts just a bit longer. He finds the sight as well as the feeling of her orgasm while he's still inside her quite pleasing.

He watches her intensely and smiles to himself when he sees what he had been looking for, something he had wanted to find conclusive evidence of. He makes note of this particular detail, and finally allows himself to give in.

"Oh…you…most definitely…close your…eyes," he groans and he's not sure if what he's saying are existing words as he climaxes, too.

His own orgasm is quite forceful and actually feels rather good to lose himself in this world, in this room, in her for only a couple of seconds. He closes his eyes, experiencing the colors behind his eyelids. He doesn't blame himself for temporarily losing sight of everything, since it's a rather natural way for the body to behave in this situation.

When the initial feeling of his orgasm has worn off and only the semi-intense and less overwhelming state of physical bliss remains, he opens his eyes and pulls out of her. He almost literally slips off her body, rolls onto his back, and he becomes quite aware of his own panting all of a sudden. She has a much better stamina than him, and her breathing pattern seems to have recovered quite a bit already, and he feels a dent in his pride once again.

Irene rolls onto her side without touching him, and now the roles have shifted and he's the one being examined, the one being observed, albeit for different purposes.

"Don't worry," she says, and he knows that she read what he was thinking. Her voice is soft but she certainly doesn't try to hide the naughty edge to it, "we'll work on your stamina. Practice makes perfect."

She doesn't care about the same things he does, but there's something that brought them together not just physically, but mentally as well, so there must be something they have in common. It might just be the idea that they're both broken individuals, damaged by their past lives, and he knows they have to rely on each other in order not to get bored out of their minds. It's a fatal attraction, whether it's mental or physical (he knows it's generally the former that counts for the both of them). They're flawed and they don't even try to hide it from each other because they both know.

He opens his mouth to make a witty remark, but she shakes her head, and he shuts his mouth again, leaving her with a satisfied look on her face. She has managed to make him, Sherlock Holmes, shut his mouth, something which not many individuals can claim to have achieved.

They just lie down for a while. The relative lack of sound in the room is something that could be described as silence from an external point of view, but their minds (and hearts, although that would be denied by either one of them) are racing.

Irene gets up into a sitting position, stretching her arms above her head before getting up from the bed, allowing him one more look at her shape before she disappears into the bathroom.

Sherlock stares down at himself, and he finds a mess in the perspiration and marks on his body, the condom that's still wrapped around him, and the messed up sheets. He doesn't need to look over the edge of the bed to know that their clothes can be found spread across the floor towards the bedroom door. He'll pick those up later.

He closes his eyes and stares at the ceiling before closing his eyes and trying to memorize and categorize all of the new and edited entries in the Irene Adler files. He doesn't remember how long he spent in his mind palace, but when he looks up, Irene is staring down at him rather disapprovingly. Her hair is still rather damp from the shower she took, and she's still naked, the towel she's using to dry her hair doesn't cover up anything at all.

Getting up and brushing past her towards the bathroom, he confirms one more mental note without showing his smirk to her and closing the Irene Adler files for the time being.

Hygiene is of paramount importance.