He's so late to the next crime scene that he almost misses Beckett entirely - she's about to close her car door, and he has to sprint across the concrete lot. Her sugar-free vanilla latte sloshes all over the coat that he just had Kizzy's hair dry-cleaned off of.
"Big date last night, Castle?" she asks, arching an eyebrow at him and stepping back up out of the car. Her voice is normal and her eyes don't have that tight, disappointed look they sometimes get, but – it's not that she snatches the coffee away, not even close, but her fingers don't linger on it, so that they're simultaneously touching the cup, the way they sometimes do. The way they often do, lately.
He's about to tell her, he really is. But he hasn't talked to her in the two days since he's gotten Kizzy, and there's suddenly something that makes him hesitate, a lump in his throat that it's difficult to speak through. Didn't he agree with her, the last time they talked about it, that it would have been silly to keep Royal, that he didn't have enough time for a dog? And then he can't help thinking back to just before that conversation, when they'd been crouched on opposite sides of the room, fighting over an animal that he'd had absolutely no desire to fight over. More than anything, it's the memory of that fission that makes him pause, and then she's talking.
"Never mind," she says, and the little bit of flatness in her tone brings him around.
"No, no date, unless you count a movie with Alexis – Just a crazy morning."
"Right," she says, narrowing her eyes at him slightly. He's not sure what to say to counter her obvious disbelief, so he stands there awkwardly until she sighs and continues. "Get in. I'll fill you in on Mr. Schenectady on the way to the precinct."
"Is it a juicy one?" he asks hopefully, trying to recover from the stilted conversation.
"Not unless you count the jug of Tropicana he was carrying that spilled everywhere when he was shot," she responds with a wry smile.
"That sounds excessively messy," he says, opening the car door. When he sinks into the passenger seat, he feels the press of a milk bone in his back pocket – when did that get there? – and, remembering the slightly querulous look Kizzy gave him on his way out the door, he resolves that he'll escape for a long lunch to check on his dog.
Though they wrap Schenectady's death quickly – Castle had the shifty-looking brother pegged from the moment he first saw him – another body drops a day later. He gets her call when he and Kizzy are bounding through Washington Square Park. Well, she's doing her arrhythmic lope, and he's puffing along beside her, sure that's he's seconds from a cardiac arrest, but, at any rate, they're as close to bounding as the two of them will get.
"Hey, Beckett," he puffs into the phone as he stops. Kizzy hits the end of the leash, turns, and stares reproachfully.
"We've got a – what's wrong with you?"
"Just going for a run." He tries to sound nonchalant, but he's still gasping desperately for air. Next time, he vows, he and Kizzy are going to bound at a far more moderate pace.
"It's eighteen degrees out, Castle."
"No weather can prevent me from keeping up with my manly musculature." He almost sounded in control of his breathing, there, but then he coughs, and, embarrassingly, he keeps coughing. There's this tickle in his lungs and a coppery tang in his mouth. He vaguely hopes that he's not dying. Kizzy bumps her head up against his hand. She's gradually thawed to him in the handful of days they've been together, enough that he's sure if he collapsed in the park, bleeding from his mouth and eyeballs due to an unfortunate case of overexertion in the freezing temperatures, she'd run and find some way to procure medical attention for him.
"It doesn't sound like you'll make it to the scene," Beckett says. He wants to protest, but the tickle is there in his lungs, and he has to swallow down a cough. "Just meet us at the precinct when you recover." She clicks the phone off before he can say anything. He can't tell if she was angry or just in a hurry, and he doesn't like that he can't tell.
He hates missing scenes, especially given that this his second miss in as many days, but Kizzy's looking up at him with liquid eyes, and it will take a while to walk home, and he's not sure he has much of a choice.
When he tells her he's sick two weeks later, it's the first time he's really flat-out lied to her, possibly ever.
Of course, that's not the whole of it. Since she came back after the shooting, his life has been evasions and obfuscations, shadowed half-truths and omissions that are worse, so much worse, than a small lie. This lie, he'll fully admit, is ridiculous. Every time over the past two weeks that he's quietly slipped away early or during lunch or for an extra-long coffee break, the words "Gotta go check on the dog" hover at the edges of his consciousness, but now the entire situation's gotten away from him and he's not sure what to do about it.
"Stomach thing," he explains, digging the hole a little deeper, when she asks if he's okay. He's on his way out the door, taking Kizzy to a vet appointment that he's already rescheduled twice so that he could be at the precinct – the dog's displayed a healthy wariness of Martha, who has no desire to take her, and Alexis' new internship consumes her weekday hours.
Beckett mentions stopping by later, and he agrees in a kind of noncommittal way that guarantees she won't make the effort. She's been like this, the sixteen days since he got the dog, a little questioning, a little tentative. Sometimes, he thinks he's just waiting for some indication that she cares enough to ask him point-blank what the hell he thinks he's doing.
