For Pau,

even if it's not your birthday anymore I'm still gonna celebrate it

Tapping a staccato rhythm on his leg with her socked feet, she tries to focus on the ink stained pages. Candlelight flickers across her vision, making the pages flash capriciously before retreating back to the shadows. She gives up on the tapping, starts kneading the balls of her feet into the muscle of his thigh. Rain pelts against the windows as the wind scrapes against the glass, making them rattle, and she hopes they hold. The hurricane's been howling outside all day, buildings groaning with the force of it.

They've been wrapped in blankets since the morning, locked inside his loft because it was going to be fun. It was supposed to be a sort of adventure, the hurricane trapping them inside his loft with no electricity and no heat. But they've been here all day and all he's wanted to do for the past two hours is work on his edits, pen and paper like the good old days, he says. At first she found it entirely too sexy, the swipe of his fountain pen over the wrinkled sheets, but it's been two hours and she's vibrating with pent up energy.

She flexes her ankles, points her feet like her ballet teacher taught her when she was seven, and her toes end up wedged between his jeans and the couch cushion. Wriggling them, she tries and inevitably fails to focus on the book, distracted by the heat of his leg and the flicker of light over the aged paper. She lifts her big toes, presses them further into his thigh and relishes in the tightening of the muscles there.

"Kate." His tone is meant to warn her but it only spurs her on, anticipation filling her chest at the fact that she's finally managed to distract him. She rolls her ankles, lets her feet drift further into the space between the couch and his leg. His fingers come to her ankle, curl there and stroke the sharp jut of her bone, tracing her fibula until it disappears into the muscle of her leg.

She looks up at him, sees what the candlelight does to him. He's all harsh cheekbones and warm eyes that slope into a sharp nose. He looks soft yet somehow sinister and it completely does it for her. She takes advantage of her feet under his thigh, rises up just as she reaches to put the book on the coffee table. Her lips come to his shoulder, as far as she can reach, and she darts her tongue out against the cotton of his t-shirt. She waits, leaves her open mouth there until he cants into her and suddenly she can reach the column of his throat.

Her lips trail up his neck, wet and teasing, and she nibbles his pulse point as it thumps steadily under her lips. She sees his hands clench, fingers tightening around his pen as he tries to continue editing. But then her teeth sink into the hollow of his collarbone and she all too clearly spots the trail of ink he didn't intend to mark his page with.

She feels him swallow, his throat working and Adam's apple bobbing under her tongue as she sweeps her mouth across his skin and brings her hands to his chest. She lets her fingertips ghost over his chest, revels in the warmth he provides as her nails, pale paint cracking like an old sidewalk overtaken by roots, scratch their way over his abdominal muscles.

They contract under her touch and she hears a sharp exhale somewhere above her, feels warm breath rustle her hair and coil around the shell of her ear. She smiles into his collarbone, lips pressed tightly to his skin and she tastes that particular swirl of salt and musk she's come to know him by. Nuzzling her nose further into his warm skin, she darts her tongue out to taste more of it, entirely addicted in too little time.

She's about to dip her hand lower, really get him to pay attention to her, but then his head is turning and his lips are coming closer until they're roughly pressed against hers and mmm yeah there we go. She sucks his tongue into her mouth because she's been waiting for this for two hours now and that is entirely too long a time to be staring at his dexterous fingers with her imagination as the only option. When he pulls away, making sure he's out of range so she can't follow, he smirks at her and trails his fingers over her calf.

"Waiting to do that for a while, huh?" She huffs at him, doesn't deny it because she knows it's pointless. She just showed him exactly how long she'd been waiting. "You know I love it when you get impatient."

"Yeah, well, it was only fair." There's laughter in his eyes, a mirth she loves seeing there. Especially when she puts it there.

"Only fair that you seduce me when I'm trying to get work done?" He raises and eyebrow at her but she knows better.

"What do you call the five years you've been following me around?" He scoffs at that as if he's truly offended by her accusation, as if this beautiful thing between them didn't start out as a way to get into her pants.

"Work."

"Yeah, sure, Castle." She shakes her head at him, pulls her feet out from beneath his legs and curls them under her own.

"Siren."

"Philanderer."

"Temptress."

"Gigolo."

"Heathen."

"Not related. I win." She grins at him, wiggles in her seat as she preens. Pouting, lower lip protruding like a little boy, Castle sulks back in his seat, an author defeated by his girlfriend at a game of words.

"I still win when we play Scrabble." She leans into him, sets her chin on his shoulder and casts teasing eyes up at him.

"We've played Scrabble once." His eyes are crinkled at the edges, laugh lines radiating from the corners, reminding her of tracking birds in the winter when she was little, following the tiny footprints they left in the snow only to come to the end and see that they'd simply taken flight.

"Yeah, and I won." She laughs at him, truly delighted with his childishness even after being cooped up with him all day. Gusts of wind press up against the glass of the windows, howling to be let in but she just curls into him. He picks up his pen again, probably to resume editing, and she can't hold in the groan because she's not good at being this still. He chuckles, crosses something out before looking down at her.

"How bored are you right now?" She opens her mouth to say she's not, that she's perfectly content to sit here for another two hours and watch him trail ink across wrinkled paper, but she knows he can feel it in the way her body hums with energy.

"Extremely." She sighs, sits up straighter and fiddles with the hem of her shirt because at least then she'll be doing something. He cocks his head to the side, studies her for a moment before hopping off the couch. Cold rushes into the suddenly unoccupied space by her side and she pulls the blanket tighter, wraps it around her to trap the heat.

She sees the dark form of him where the candlelight doesn't reach, a grey shadow against the black of his kitchen. It's haunting, how dark it is in the spaces with no candles, the city's flashing neon signs and lighted windows temporarily out of commission. She hears him rummaging around for something in the cabinets, the slide of drawers and sounds of him closing his fingers in one of the doors. Then a light clicks on and his face lights up, dark shadows under his eyes and nose as he brings the lantern he must have collected over years of indoor camping trips with Alexis under his chin.

"Come on, Beckett." He makes his way to the front door, beam of light guiding the way as she unwraps herself and hesitantly follows him.

"Castle, where are you going? You can't leave the building," she catches his arm, pulls him back so he'll look at her even in the inky black, "it's horrible out there." He twists his arm out of her grasp, empty hand falling to his side, continues on until he's passing through his front door and the light shines out ahead of him into the black.

"Who said anything about leaving the building?"