They take one of his cars out of the city: a 2010 Bentley Continental GT. The convertible bears a marginally subtler profile than the Ferrari and a more comfortable ride. Something about the machine just...gets to Beckett. Watching it emerge from the parking garage with the sunlight gleaming along the deepest black paint job she's ever seen sets her teeth to clenching. Luxury and elegance are two of the automobile's advertising points, but to her it looks like something engineered to roar furiously at break-neck speed upon the razor edge of control, and she feels a sharp sympathetic eagerness.
Castle rolls down the driver's side window, takes one lasting look at her, and sighs with pointed volume as he gets out and walks around to the passenger side. The detective grins with shameless delight and darts forward to slide into the cool, cozy seating. A bit of fiddling adjusts the space to her height. She yelps in surprise at the sensation of the seat cushion shifting subtly beneath her. It configures itself into an approximation of the shape of her butt.
Her companion pouts at her as she wiggles her hips experimentally. "Is it weird that I'm a little jealous right now?"
"Wow," she replies, quivering with amusement. "This is your car alright. Overabundant and obscene. Buckle up, pervert."
Hand-stitched leather, polished wood paneling, digital everything—their ride screams affluence. The earthy hues of the interior elicit some suspicion that the owner bore her specifically in mind while choosing the color scheme, subconsciously if nothing else. There's her hair color, her eye color. That's not creepy at all. Nothing dissuades such minor concerns quite like the feel of six-hundred horsepower at ones beck and call.
She puts too much on it when the first red light flips to green; the car growls out something downright bestial and tears away from the line with all the suddenness of a predator in motion. The sound widens her eyes and sends a tingle down the length of her spine. She strokes at the steering wheel in reply. "Oh, baby, yes. Talk dirty to me."
Her passenger snorts quietly and shakes his head.
They skirt Hell's Kitchen along the 9A and whip their way around to the upper GW. Traffic is too thick for screwing around, but Beckett is a safe driver even when she doesn't have to be. Judging by her passengers reaction, that is a matter for some debate when she's forced to slip between a pair of tractor trailers to make the exit for the Cross Island Parkway. It's not that small a gap, but he latches onto the oh-shit handle and grimaces. An air horn bellows protestation in their wake, but within the luxury sports car it is almost indiscernible. A little thrill runs through her...so, okay, maybe it was that small.
Castle exhales audibly, plops a hand over his chest, and scrunches his upper half some to study the view in the passenger side mirror. "I don't see anything, but I'm pretty sure we left my early-forties back there."
Beckett huffs out a clipped note of mirth. "I may or may not have climaxed."
"I may or may not be sending you the cleaning bill for that seat, young lady."
Conversation is sparse and light like that until they have put the city limits in the rear-view mirror. Traffic begins to thin out on the LIE. The open countryside is donning fiery hues under the deeply slanting sun behind them. The demand for strict awareness diminishes enough for both to let their attentions focus more upon their surrounds, and on one another.
There is a surreal component to that.
Holy shit, we're really doing this. Part of her is expecting to wake up in her apartment at any moment and find herself alone in the darkness of her bedroom. She can almost feel the coldness of the sheet where another warm body could, but wouldn't, be lying next to her. Another part of her is tensed and waiting for her companion to do...something. Something wrong. She awaits an act that will prove to both of them what a colossal mistake this is. Waking up alone and aching from such a pleasant dream as 'them' thus far might be preferable to that.
But the author nearby has set the lenses of his Bvlgari sunglasses on the horizon before them and seems, for all the world, to be content in silence. He doesn't squirm or fiddle, doesn't play with the radio or his cell phone. She's never seen him so uncharacteristically still.
"What gives?" she finally asks.
"Hrm?"
The detective shifts in her seat and lofts a few fingers from the wheel. "Well, look at you. I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times we've enjoyed such a peaceful ride, and few of those were even half as long as this one."
Castle sits upright more in her peripherals and his lips tug into a puzzled frown as though he were only just then realizing his own good behavior. It's funny to behold, but having it pointed out doesn't dissuade him from it. At length he shrugs his left shoulder and says, "I'm a little hungry."
"Huh? Is that your explanation, or are you asking to stop?"
"The second one."
Beckett clicks her tongue against her teeth. "I'll pull over if you answer me."
"Really? You're going to hold my grumbling belly hostage?"
"I'm not gonna lie: it's pretty nefarious of me. I bet if you squint there's an informative lesson to be learned somewhere in there about absconding with a detective for a weekend getaway. That's good to know, huh?"
Castle's smirking even as he turns away some and sighs quietly. The reluctance is a little bewildering. Finally, he says, "I suppose I'm simply happier with the journey as it stands now more than I am eager to reach a destination."
Well now. That shuts her up for the next several miles. She pulls into a gas station ten minutes later and watches him head inside. Then she drops her forehead onto the wheel with a soft bleat from the horn. "Please," she issues aloud, though a prayer feels a bit alien on her lips. Please don't let me screw the pooch on this one, God. Love, Katie.
"Hey, lady, cool it!" Beckett lifts her head to find a scowling old man in a tan wind-breaker guiding his wife along the walkway past the nose of the Bentley. She startled them with the horn. The rail-thin, white-haired woman clinging to his elbow lifts her other spindly arm with a sway of her floral print dress and gives Kate the finger.
So...is that a 'no' on the assist? 'Cause it looks like a no.
Her partner returns within a few minutes. He's procured a Snapple iced tea for himself, a blackberry flavored Clearly Canadian for her, and a bottle of water that is also for her in case she doesn't approve of his primary suggestion. She does. He opens a bag of cool ranch flavored Doritos and sets them in a neutral zone on the console between them.
"You snack while you're riding around in this holy of holies?"
"I do."
"You fucking heathen," she snarls in mock outrage, and he's surprised into a full, brief laugh.
The sonorous sound zings along her central nervous system like a little zap of electricity. It is a rare thing to hear. The twelfth precinct is not the place for laughter. Oh, it happens, but out of respect for any victims or relatives who might be on the floor somewhere, most officers learn to adopt a quieter quiver of amusement as opposed to the freedom of sound. More than that though, laughter is a social bonding mechanism. In the past, giving in to that act came to resemble a form of capitulation. If she actually laughed, fully and freely, he'd score a point in the game they've been engaged at for the past year. She'd fall behind or lose in some indefinable manner.
Experiencing it now from him, Beckett shakes her head with a wide smile. Game over. Good riddance to that bit of lunacy.
"You have the most gorgeous smile," her passenger observes. Kate's attention snaps back to him with her eyes widened involuntarily. Her startled reaction elicits a little twitch of his eyebrows, perhaps a blip of regret. He faces forward again, neither smiling nor frowning. He just looks...ready to keep going.
She has her teeth clenched again, and interestingly enough the causality is not so dissimilar to her previous lust for break-neck speed. It just so happens to not involve the car this time. Jeez, Katie, it was just a compliment. Might be a tad rash to climb into his lap and dry hump him over it. That's true. Very true. And yet...
The detective rolls her window down and focuses resolutely on the road ahead of them. It isn't long before the west-bound lane to their left is lit by oncoming headlights in addition to the waning influence of twilight. Their mutual silence endures, but it feels much less like a lack of something now, more like a choice. In this unfamiliar terrain, that's a blessedly recognizable element. They've worked closely together long enough to have no trouble slipping in and out of conversation. The quality of it is admittedly charged at present, but even that is not an uncomfortable thing per se.
"I've come to favor the way night falls out here," Castle offers some time later.
"Like a blanket being pulled over the world," she agrees. "Slow and certain."
He nods and goes quiet again for the next half-mile. Then continues, "It wasn't always so. I was afraid of the dark for an inordinate portion of my youth." It is clearly not an admission intended to play to her sense of humor. Even if it were, Richard Castle volunteering personal information strikes her as anything but amusing. "It was a strange variation of the phobia. Our house could be as black as pitch and I was fine, but if I got caught outside, even under the stars and a full moon, I would shake like the crust of the world above a shifting fault line." The fingertips of his right hand, poised aloft by his elbow set upon the window edge, trace pensively across the curve of his lower lip. "Sometimes I still feel it humming in my blood, like the reverberations of an echo that's nearly spent."
Something about the admission strikes her as being inexpressibly sad; a detail she cannot identify, but senses hiding just out of sight behind the actual words he chose. In an attempt to alleviate his grim train of thought she volleys, "Yeah, you must be unsettled. It's not like you to mix metaphors." The author's smile unveils with surprising ease.
"It all tumbles out freely in the first draft," he explains. The brief sideways glance she shoots him snags there and lingers. Those eyes are almost painfully definitive of the man. In the proper lighting they can be as vibrant as raw sapphires. Other times, as now, they gleam as darkly as the very beating heart of midnight. The range of shades in between is all too fitting for a man she's witnessed navigate the gamut of human emotion to its polar extremes. "We're listing," he says calmly.
Beckett jerks her attention back to the road with a little swerve of correction. Her cheeks warm with a blush she's thankful occurs in the concealing dimness of the automobile. I meant to do that.
"That's exit seventy up ahead," Castle offers.
She slows as they approach it and glides them down the curved incline to merge onto C.R. 111. Traffic is still on the thin side, but ahead of them the evening skyline bears the faint whitish glow of another blotch of civilization. Soon enough, intermittent globes of pale radiance peek over the canopy of the forest paralleling the country road on both sides.
Beckett moistens her lips with a glance to her shadow. "You, uh, mentioned Montauk being 'the very essence of private'." Without his sunglasses on anymore she's privy to the sheer lack of reaction on his face, visible in the bluish radiance cast by the instrument panel. It's clear he's been expecting the question to arise. "Is that a good or bad thing?"
"Mother owned a small home there once, up until I was about six." Her lips purse some at the seeming divergence, but she doesn't interrupt. "Even after she was forced to sell it we vacationed there later on in my teens." He blinks slowly and nods once. "She knew people. I was twenty-five before I finally had the means to buy the beach house."
"Yeah, you were a real late bloomer," she comments with mild sarcasm. He glances over at her with a minimal smile. Twenty-five. Sheesh. If Beckett worked all the way up to one-hundred-and-five she still wouldn't be able to swing a summer home on the coast of Long Island. Hell, she can't even afford the property taxes.
"Is my wealth something that gives you pause now that we're...taking steps?"
She loves the way he puts it; no grand verse to compound the pressure, merely the suggestion of the journey that has begun. The driver considers her reply, frowns. "Y'know, I'm not even sure what kind of wealth we're talking about."
"Well, there are obviously some fluctuations involved, but before Nikki Heat came along it was about sixty-seven million."
Her jaw drops like a stone in a pond. "Holy fuckin'—whoa! I-I wasn't asking for the number, Castle, jeez."
"Oh." He shrugs one shoulder with his gaze tracking a passing road sign, unaware or unheeding of the shock that has rooted her in place. "It's one of those things though, right? It's good to know the allowances and limitations."
"Good to know," Beckett quotes mockingly, and damn it, her voice cracks and squeaks.
He remains calm enough for both of them. "So the money is an issue then?"
"No!" Kate expels forcefully and winces, checks her volume. "No," she reiterates more calmly, "it's not an 'issue', Castle. It's just...a lot. To digest that is. No, I mean that literally and figuratively." The passenger looks at her and then back to the road ahead of them. He doesn't seem to know what to say. "Listen, it's great that you want to get more, uh, personal with one another. Just give me a heads-up before you go dropping stuff like that on me, okay?"
The novelist nods in seemingly easy compliance, but the look on his face...
Beckett checks the rear-view, which is clear, and slows to a halt along the side of the road. The rapidity of it surprises the other. Tit for tat and all that. He starts to question her purpose, but halts and grimaces to behold her scowl.
"Yeah," she grumbles, turning on the seat to face him more squarely, "you're in for it. Come on, seriously now, look at me." He does, more from the corners of his eyes though. She reaches for his chin and manually aligns their faces across the console dividing them. "I'm happy you asked me to come with you, Rick." Maybe it's the sound of his first name upon the air; she feels the completeness of his focus afterward. "So don't just nod at me. It's a—" she pauses, swallows past the lump of her own trepidation, and starts again. "It's a huge risk for me. If this flops and we can't get past it afterward, I'm losing out big time. We both are, I know, but that's what this is for me personally. It's no small thing."
"For me either," he agrees quietly, deeply.
"Okay," she takes a cleansing breath, "good. Then you can imagine the seriousness the words hold for me when I tell you that I want us to know one another better as we explore this, all those things that we kept to ourselves before. I'm asking for some notice on the, uh, big stuff. I'm not asking for you to stop. There's a difference between the two."
"I can imagine," he confirms, and his exhale is noticeably shaky. Oh god...what? "And I appreciate the distinction." It hits her hard just how worried he actually is at that moment. As if gleaning the spreading chill of her awareness, Castle continues, "We're about to wade into something far more meaningful to me than numbers, Beckett. I guess," he adds with a minuscule smile, "you should consider this your word of warning. And that in turn is the answer to your question."
The question of whether his history in Montauk is good or bad. It's bad. Shit. Now she has no idea what to say.
A/N: Real quick, I want to welcome everyone to the tale, and thank people for sharing their thoughts so far.
