Reaching Forever
Water surrounding me
I am wide open
Reaching forever
I fly
into the blue
-Into the Blue, Moby
The sky is beautiful.
Rick Castle sits alone in his Adirondack chair and watches the smudged clouds drift over the distant water, the Atlantic tumbled by a persistent breeze that finger-combs through the waves. The oncoming storm is heavy at the horizon but flamed tongues of sunset lick through, streaking pink against the grey.
He can't close his eyes, won't.
The vast expanse, the wide open blue before him - the sky is beautiful and it's everything; it means - a metaphor of his existence; his philosophy painted before him on the landscape of his Hamptons home.
He won't close his eyes; he can't. Not this Saturday evening, not yet.
He has to drive home tomorrow; he doesn't want to let go of this weekend.
He holds on to it even as it fades, even as the dark drops shadows along the sand, coats the white sand with luminescence. Fireflies wink lemon-green like Chinese lanterns strung up along the vast expanse of lawn, on and off again, drifting.
The wooden slats of his chair have turned hard against the bones of his hips, the knobs of his spine. Summer unspools in ribbons around him, the touch of deeper velvet where the water meets the sky, and the disappearing flame of day is brushed over by clouds.
The breeze rustles the grass, whispers coming back to him like sighing promises, and her light touch at his ear makes him jump.
She chuckles in the near-dark, rubbing his earlobe between her fingers, but he sighs. "I didn't hear you."
"Guess not."
He lifts his eyes to her as she orbits him, her fingers trailing at his collar as a center along her radius, but instead of moving to his chair's mate, her trajectory curls inward to him. Kate cups the back of his neck and settles in with him in the wide, wooden seat, the press of her body against his - ribs to ribs - like a seal on the day.
"Gonna storm," she murmurs, her eyes filled with dark horizon.
Lightning forks from the mass brewing off shore and she breathes sharply in surprise at his side, so close, her legs slung over the arm of the chair, her shoulder tucked under his arm. He can't help lifting his hand and stroking the hair from her face. The short dark waves, almost curls, the wild pieces - those he loves to feel at the back of his hand, sliding along his thumb.
She turns her head into his palm and kisses the base of his knuckle before nudging her chin into his hand to knock him away. "I get it, Castle," she murmurs, eyes flickering to him and then back to the shoreline. "You like the haircut."
"I like the color too," he sighs, words coming out before he can hold them in. But she's got that half-smirk lifting one side of her lips, the side away from him. Still, he knows. He can tell. She cut it right before he saw her on Friday; he had that moment of oh when his eyes touched her profile across the distance.
"It had gotten too long; that's all," she protests again.
She didn't do it for him. No. Didn't do it because he mentioned he had kinda liked the brush of dark at her shoulders, the fall of layers along her cheeks.
He doesn't let the smile get too big, doesn't rub it in. "That's all," he echoes, as patronizingly as he can even as she grunts and elbows him. He rumbles with something approximating a laugh and leans in to put his nose at her neck, smell the honeyed scent of her hair and skin.
Her hand comes up and skims along his jaw, back to his hear where she tweaks in warning. He lifts his head to press a soft kiss to her cheek, parts his lips to get the corner of her mouth. She tastes like the hope of stars in the blue dusk.
Kate turns her head into the kiss, a touch of her tongue that draws his arm around her waist, makes him sit forward into her, makes him want to abandon the sky to its storm.
But she strokes her fingers along his neck, scrapes at the beginnings of his stubble, presses her thumb to his adam's apple before breaking the kiss with a slow drag of her lips away. His eyes open to finds hers shadowed but sparking in the deep twilight, the green like a firefly right after it's burned bright and gone out again - traces of light contrails.
"Next year," she says quietly, her hand brushing down his shirt to lay just beside his heart, fingers idly playing at a button.
"Next year?"
She nods, and it doesn't even look like courageous determination. It just looks like love.
"Not too big," she warns him.
"No," he shakes his head. "Just our family. Families. The ones who matter."
She slips a finger between the placket and seems to be studying it. "It's beautiful... here."
"Here?" Castle lifts his head to glance around them, the shadowed grass, the sand in the distance, the curl of waves unceasing. Like he's never seen it before. Here. "Kate, I didn't suggest this weekend to somehow persuade you of the merits of a Hamptons-"
"Despite your pure intentions, it has," she says, a little dryly, an eyeroll in there somewhere if he could see it. She's facing away from him now, her hair dark and barely brushing him, that rich scent of sun and musk coming up from her skin.
"It was just to give you a break. From the job." He hesitates on the word, circles his finger at her knee.
"To give you a break?" she laughs, turning her head back to him with a little knowing smile. "No, I know. But it is persuasive."
"I didn't realize I should be making an argument."
She shakes her head. "If you had, I'd have argued against."
"True." He smirks back at her narrow-eyed look. "Kate, it doesn't matter to me. Now or some day, next July or 'when we have the time.' It doesn't matter if it's specified."
She's nodding her head as her finger untangles from his shirt, but she lifts her gaze to his, their eyes meeting in a soft touch of glances that makes her look sweet and sensual both - adoration and determination mingling like wisps of cloud in a dark sky, barely discernible.
"But it should matter," she murmurs. "You should be after me to set a date, want to push me to set a date. It should matter that it's only been eventually."
"No," he insists, stroking a finger at her hipbone to feel the strength there. "What matters is yes. I only want you."
He tries to give her a cocky smile, but she throws an arm around his neck and crushes her mouth to his, fierce and supplicant in one, the stroke of her tongue demanding even as she gasps into him. Her body surges like the storm-blanketed ocean, and he bends her against the arm of the chair, taking, taking what she gives, taking yes and eventually both.
He breaks the kiss with a tug of her bottom lip and stares down at her, his body coiled and pressed, needing. He needs. She waits.
"Set a date then, Beckett."
She blinks but draws her other arm around him slowly, both now hooked at the back of his neck, her gaze intent, serious. "Seven. Two. Fourteen."
"Winning lotto numbers?"
"It's a Wednesday," she says clearly.
A Wednesday. She already knows it's a Wednesday. She's studied it, then. She knows.
She tilts her head in the gloaming, her hair a vision around the pale moon of her face. "Wednesday is strange, I know, but it's the week of the Fourth, and most people will be able to take it off. And I like how it works out - the math, the numbers. Seven, two, fourteen."
July 2nd, 2014.
Kate Beckett is going to marry him, yes and eventually and July.
July.
Castle strokes his fingers at her cheek and into her hair, her body already lost to the shading darkness, guiding himself to her by touch alone. He presses a kiss to the set of her mouth and feels her opening to him, wide and without a doubt, reaching for forever.
I do.