A bit of fluff brought on by the first sunshine I'd seen in weeks during the snowppocalypse. This really hasn't been edited much, so please forgive any errors!
Set late season 4 but before all the drama around 47 seconds etc.
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"This Day" or "On This Day, For No Particular Reason"
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Beckett was out walking, with no particular destination in mind. It was Saturday and for the first time in several rainy weeks, the sun was out. The warmth was beating down on the street, the people, and Beckett herself; and she didn't need to be squinting against the light to be fully aware of difference it made. The crowds were less crabby, the honks from the passing cars less frequent, the smiles more sincere. And deep within her own chest, between her sternum and her lungs, she could feel the final vestiges of a tension she had been carrying around since her shooting finally loosen.
Breathing more freely than she had in months, sucking down big heaps of warmth with each breath, she imagined that she was inhaling the sunshine itself. It would slip down her throat and into her lungs and effuse throughout her bloodstream from there, saturating her with a carefree lightness. She chuckled aloud at the image of sunshine shooting from her fingers and toes, walking onward until a little flower cart caught her eye. Not the cart, really, but a particular arrangement of yellow and orange flowers that were exactly the same color as the sunshine and her mood. She rolled her eyes at herself, but headed over anyway.
She wouldn't really call herself the flowers type. She never knew which ones she was looking at, or what they were supposed to signify. Plants that had been gifted to her over the years had seemed to die pitiful deaths within hours, suicidal, and the last ones she'd received had been back at the hospital. Still, there was something about this day that had the fingers of one hand glancing over the softness of the petals, the fragrance and bits of pollen staying with her as she withdrew her hand. She was rubbing her thumb to her forefinger, letting the prettiness of the bouquet keep her spirit uplifted, when a familiar and welcome voice broke into her consciousness.
"If you want flowers, Beckett, I'd be happy to provide them for you."
Beckett took her time turning toward him, using the moment to reign in the force of her sudden smile with her teeth, gnawing it into submission. Still, she was grinning when she did finally step back an turn toward her unexpected company. She flipped her sunglasses back onto her head so she could see him properly, then squinted up at him where he was framed by the bright midday light.
"Hey, Castle." Her voice was low and mellow, softened by his presence.
Castle was standing mere feet from her, a hip propped against a light pole and his eyes crinkled at the smile on her face.
"So is this what Detective Beckett does when she's off duty?" he asked with a grin. "It's been so long, I can't remember."
"I can barely remember myself," she agreed with a bob of her head. "It's been a long few weeks. Where are you headed?"
Castle shrugged, the massive muscles of his shoulders rising and falling in casual response. "I was just wandering. Enjoying the weather. But now I think I was on my way to buy you some flowers."
Beckett laughed, pleased, but shook her head. "You shouldn't. I'll just kill them."
Nodding seriously, Castle rubbed a hand over his face. He looked from her, to the flowers, and back again. With another shrug, he turned and plucked the bouquet off the cart. "Even so. Better to have loved and lost, then to never have had the flowers at all." He handed them to her with a flourish and a knowing sparkle in his eye as he said the word love, then turned back to pay the cart attendant. With his back to her, Beckett could watch the play of his muscles beneath his shirt, and wondered if he'd been hitting the gym. She didn't remember there being so much definition in his upper body or such a tapering at his waist.
Beckett knew she was staring too much, that her lips had parted in a telling smile, that if he turned around it would take too long to drag her eyes away from his physique. But he was wearing a tee-shirt instead of a button down, and while she liked the way he looked at the precinct this... this was a different kind of attractive. Laid back and comfortable and his biceps were so readily visible as the muscles played beneath the soft fabric. At least, she thought it would be soft. It looked worn, like maybe it was one of his favorites.
Then he did turn around, and he did catch her looking. There could be no disguising the look on her face, so instead of trying to deny it Beckett tipped her bright bouquet toward her face and inhaled. The flowers smelled just as heady as the easy swirl of arousal she was feeling, and when she looked back up at Castle his face was full of it too. It was warm and lethargic and drunk with happiness and foreshadowing . She bit her lip, and looked up at him through her lashes.
"Thanks for these, Castle. But don't flowers usually come at the beginning of a date?"
Where the bravery came from, she couldn't say, but she had to work physically to keep herself from backing away after she'd said the words. For two seconds, maybe three, Castle stood completely still and gazed at her with slowly lifting eyebrows. For those two, maybe three seconds, she was sure her heart didn't bother to beat. But then Castle shifted, his stance relaxing, his face beaming, and she could breath again.
"How could I be so stupid?" He asked with a grin. "Of course the flowers mean we need to go on a date."
He offered her his arm as he looked around with a furrowed brow. His shirt was just as soft as it looked, she was happy to confirm, and more importantly so was the skin her fingers could reach while her hands were wrapped around his arm. When she circled her fingers over the softness just below the shirtsleeve on the inside of his arm, Castle's eyes flew to hers with the sharpness and clarity of really expensive diamonds. She met his gaze, and didn't stop.
Fifteen minutes later they were sliding into a booth at an anonymous sports bar. It wasn't perfect first-date material, but Castle hadn't stopped gazing at her and while they were so focused on the nuances of each other, the noise of the barroom could only barely penetrate their combined consciousnesses. They had two craft beers each, shared a plate of sweet potato fries, and declined the waiter's suggestion of onion rings with a look of promise shared between them.
No onion. No garlic. No thank you. Not today.
Castle was leaning forward with his elbows on the table, his mostly empty bottle pushed to one side now. Beckett could read the intensity of his gaze as well as any chapter he'd ever written, and she felt giddy with it, drunk and languid and drowsy but dangerous. Because he could read it in her, too; how far past the usual line of demarcation they'd drifted and how she couldn't find it within herself to care. How she much didn't want to.
How much she wanted something else.
They were waiting for a town car outside of that bar when he kissed her for the first time. His hands were in her hair and tugging her to him, as if he could possibly need to hold her there. Through the dizzying sensations of his lips on hers and the incredible heat when he parted his them, Beckett had just enough wherewithal to pull away and nod toward the street. The car was there, and the driver didn't look amused at being made to wait. Beckett and Castle only laughed at him with flushed cheeks.
When they were seated, Castle gave the driver Beckett's address. Despite Castle's tendency to be verbose, they had come to a mutual agreement about what they were doing without a word in the way of definition. In the back of the car the silent discourse continued, but for the occasional sigh or muted moan.
They walked from the car to the elevator of her building with their hands tangled, grinning at each other in the glow of the late afternoon sunshine. In her apartment, Castle made a big show of finding a vase and putting the beautiful bouquet on the cherry-wood table by her door. When he was finished, Beckett was standing close beside him, looking at the flowers but with a smile on her face that obviously belonged to him. To them.
She brushed the knuckles of her hand over his forearm, watching with fascination as the hairs there stood up in the wake of her touch. She swallowed more noisily than she liked, and looked up to find him watching her intensely.
"Do you want coffee?" The offer was a little shaky and more than a little transparent in it's superfluous nature. Of course he wouldn't want coffee.
He didn't. Shaking his head, "No," Castle slipped the fingers of one hand through her own, a slide of warm skin that was almost indecent in its similarity to other, dirtier sliding of skin. Beckett flushed at the thought, blinking, and was grateful that Castle looked just as far gone as she felt. She had time to note the look of nearly overwhelmed disbelief on his face before he was kissing her again, and then she could only think about what she was feeling.
What she was feeling was borderline overpowering. It was the warmth of the day centered and magnified by his kiss to a powerful heat where ever his lips were touching her skin and sinking heavily into her lower abdomen. It was happiness, and a kind of drunken relief when he returned her non sequitur grins with his own that had her surging more heavily into his arms. This was all she wanted. He was all she wanted, and when the words became too noisy of a mantra in her head, she said them aloud.
"Castle, I want you."
The admission, the request, was whispered from her lips directly into the shell of his ear, and she could feel the force of the shudder that ran through his body reverberate back through her flushed skin. He turned his head and captured her lips with his, and though the kisses remained reverent his hands were pulling her more fiercely against him. For the second time that day, Beckett was imagining the heat within her exploding outward through her fingers and toes. Castle's voice was raspy when he pulled away.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
Bumping her with his hips and his thighs, Castle walked her backward over the threshold to her bedroom. He was breathing hard and his hands were hot on her skin, but Beckett thought that she'd never seen his eyes look so at peace, so certain. She'd absolutely never seen him look so intense, and his look sent another shock of heat through her body. Beckett clung to his shoulders when he rested a knee on the bed and looped an arm around her waist as he laid her down.
There was a pause, a breath of hesitation as he hovered over her. She could see the flicker of uncertainty in his features, highlighted by the warm light filtering in through the semi-closed blinds. With a smile, she brushed her lips against the lines of worry and then pressed at the skin with her fingertips as if she could simply will them away.
"What's wrong?" Her voice was a whisper, so soft she might not have been sure she'd spoken if she couldn't see the disturbance in the little fragments of dust brought up by the novel warmth in the room.
Castle leaned into her touch, his biceps flexing deliciously as his weight shifted. "Not wrong," he murmurred, He ducked his head so he could drag his lips across the most sensitive part of her neck in an almost lazy gesture. Beckett sucked in a breath, both at the sensation and at the way her mind was running away with her, jumping ahead in an eager evasion of continuity. He was going to take his time. He was going to make her crazy and keep her there, and just the thought of it had her heart hammering. They were both still fully clothed, her fingers once again creeping under the sleeve of his tee, feeling the skin on the inside of his arm that was as soft as the flowers now adorning her entryway table.
"Castle."
She squeezed, his muscles jumping under her fingers, but he only hummed vibrations into her skin in response. He pressed the flat of his tongue against her skin just below her jaw line and stroked a languid line back to her ear. Still slow, sure, unhurried. Unlike most of her fantasies about this moment, which included a lot of frantic undressing and morning-after bruises in strange places and hurry, hurry, now, before it gets away, this didn't feel transient. This felt certain and deliberate and like they had all the time in the world.
So Beckett slipped her fingers into his hair and tugged ever so gently until his head came up. She reached up to kiss his lips once, twice, because she could, her torso tightening beneath a palm that she couldn't remember slipping beneath her shirt. Then she nudged his nose with hers and let herself fall back, his face framed by her hands. Castle was slow to bring his eyes up to meet hers. It might have been because he was finally allowed to look elsewhere, but there was avoidance in his eyes as well as lust.
"Nothing's wrong?" she reiterated, the lines above her brow only barely forming in concern. He shook his head, but the kiss he dropped onto the corner of her mouth was more evasion, and she twisted far enough away to meet his gaze again. "Then what is it?"
When Castle started to drop his head again, to hide his face against her skin, she reacted instinctively, so that when she'd knocked one of his arms out from under him and rolled them over, she was almost as surprised as he was to find him on his back. She smiled her apology and stretched out beside him, propping herself up on one elbow. She wanted an answer, but she wasn't so intent on one that she could keep herself from hooking one of her legs between his and pressing close to him. The surprise on his face settled down into arousal once again, but she resisted the tug of his hands as he tried to pull her more fully on top of him.
"Tell me."
He sighed, and when he spoke his voice was hesitant. "I don't want to ruin this." He drew one large hand down from her shoulder to drag across her ribcage and settle in the curve of her waist. Beckett could feel the involuntary arch of her back at the sensation, her muscles tensing and relaxing in ancient sequence, and she grinned at him.
"I don't think you will."
"I was just wondering... why today? Why now?" He sighed again, and pressed the heel of his hand into one eye. "But I don't want to look too closely at the gift horse. Not that I'd ever compare you to a horse."
With great difficulty Beckett resisted the urge to tease, because he seemed so uneasy about her answer. She bent down to press her lips into his shoulder in a quick kiss and settled her free hand over his heart, the fingertips swirling over the fabric in an intoxicating run.
"No particular reason," she said honestly. When his head tilted away from her and he gave her a disbelieving look, she laughed. "I'm serious. I mean, I've wanted this," she gestured between them and Castle lifted a knowing eyebrow, "for a long time. But between yesterday and today? The only thing that's changed is the weather."
"The weather," Castle repeated, rolling the words over his tongue like they were some kind of benediction. "The weather?"
Beckett's face flushed in belated embarrassment. "Yes, I mean, it was sunny today, and it was warm..."
Castle rose up suddenly, rolling her over and pressing her down into the mattress with his body and covering her lips with his own. His tongue slid over hers and his hand slid over her hip to grip her firmly and when he pulled away they were both a little breathless.
"I get it," he murmurred. "Sunshine, warmth, happiness. It's like you said, that you had to be in the right place to have the kind of..." Castle stopped abruptly, and it was written all over his face that he didn't want to say too much or apply too much pressure. But it was a silly and obsolete concern, in Beckett's opinion.
"The kind of relationship I want to have," she finished, her eyes smiling harder than her mouth because her lips were pursed to keep her emotions in check. "I want you," she repeated, though the meaning was more this time. "I want you, today, for no other reason than the fact that I was happy and then there you were. And I want you for-" She stopped. Forever was too much. "For a really long time," she compromised with a bashful lowering of her eyes.
"Here I am." It was relief that Beckett could hear in his voice, as acceptance of the truth of the fact sank in. She cupped his face in her hand and brushed a thumb over the curve of his cheek.
"Yeah."
"And you're here."
"Yeah." Beckett grinned the word, stretching up to kiss him when he stayed lifted up too far away. A long moment passed between them while their eyes were locked, their legs entangled, their emotions truly mingling for the first time.
Finally satisfied, Castle sank down in the cradle of her hips so that they were chest to chest and brushed his lips against hers again, and again, and again.
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...(end)...
A/N: Thank you for reading! I'd love to know what you think. :)