I'm flattered that so many of you seemed to like the first chapter. Truckloads of thank yous to everyone who took the time to leave me a review. Although I have to wonder, b/c I had about three times as many story alerts as I had reviews, in addition to several new author alerts, and that's kind of...weird to me. I mean, if you like it enough to want to read more, of this story or by me in general, then I really want to know WHAT you liked about it, even if it's just something simple. One reviewer pointed out that she liked how I had Beckett feeling guilty and selfish for keeping her secret, because not a lot of fics touch on that. It's those comments that convince me that people really DO want to read more, as opposed to them just maybe having had a twitchy mouse finger and accidentally clicking the check box for 'story alert' when they really thought the story was a load of crapola. So yeah, please tell me what you like, or what you don't like. It helps. And you just might end up getting more and better stuff to read. (And more often, too.)

A couple of comments: Pynki616, I'll trust that your Dylan isn't a sociopath. ;-) In another story, I used the name 'Noah' for an annoying kid. And in thinking about it, I guess I tend to reuse the names of other children that annoy my own kids (so I hear about them a lot...'Do you know what Dylan did today?') Hmmm...I'll have to watch that. Honestly, when I picked his name, I just grabbed it out of thin air. And re: the aformentioned selfishness: thanks to MTAM and eyrianone for picking up on that. Obviously, I think it's a valid point, and I really wonder if the show is going to touch on that, if she's going to show regret and if he's going to show any anger for her not admitting it sooner. It looks like the show is really hitting the 'keeping secrets' subtext thing kinda heavy lately, so it could be interesting when it comes out, and how they deal with it.

By the way, I do have a twitter account and I try to tweet when I've posted an update to a story. I'm xxGoogiexx .

Disclaimer: Nothing about the show or characters is owned by me. If I did own them, I wouldn't be here writing. :)

Previously:

Finally, he spoke. "Kate...when did you lie to me?"

She took another ragged breath and looked up at what she could see of the sky through the tall buildings. She still couldn't look at him. "Almost ten months ago now."

"Ten months?" His voice was deadly serious now, and his steps had slowed so much they'd stopped. She was ahead of him, and he tugged on her had so she'd finally turn around and face him when he asked the next question. She did turn around, but only at the insistance of that hand of his that she was holding. And after they'd stopped walking and she'd turned toward him, she'd finally gotten brave enough to look him in the face. And when she did, she was just a little taken aback by the intense look in his eyes, which were echoed by the ultra-serious tone of his voice as he said, "Kate, exactly what did you lie to me about ten months ago?" Somehow, in the way he asked the question, she knew that his mind was going to the exact day that hers was already at.

She took another breath, although it didn't really help. She still felt like her stomach was doing somersaults when she finally mustered up enough courage to tell him, "I remember getting shot, Rick. And I remember everything that happened after that until I passed out."

He just looked at her for a full minute, not moving. She saw him swallow and purse his lips, but other than that, he was totally still. But at least he was still holding her hand, so that was something.

"You remember," he said, finally. "You remember it all."

"Yes." She nodded.

"You remember...me...then..." His voice held a note of incredulity.

For once, the man with all of the words couldn't seem to find them, couldn't seem to articulate them. In another time or place, she might have laughed. Now, it was just like another dagger in her, seeing what her lie had cost him, had turned him into.

And it was a statement, not a question. He wasn't questioning her, because he knew she was telling the truth. He knew she'd lied, had been lying, had been deceiving him for those ten months.

"I remember you kneeling above me, while I was laying on the ground. And you held me, and..." She had to stop to take a breath, because she was finding the words harder and harder to form, and she was finding that it was becoming harder and harder to keep her composure. "And you...you told me not to leave you...God, you were pleading with me to stay with you, and then..." She could feel the tears in her eyes then, and she furiously blinked them back and swiped at her eye with her free hand. "And then you told me that y-"

"Yeah," he quickly interrupted in a flat voice, as if he couldn't bear to hear the words that would come next spoken aloud. "I remember. I just...didn't think you did. Because you told me that you didn't." His voice, though still flat, had a note of challenge to it. A somewhat accusatory note of challenge.

"I know. I know what I told you, and I'm sorry."

He pursed his lips and gave her a little nod that could have meant anything. "Yeah." She chose to hope that it was a positive sign, that he was just digesting the news, processing her apology. But then his gaze flitted down to where their hands were still joined, and he slowly extricated his hand from hers and shoved it into his pocket, as if he wanted to hide it from her so she couldn't take it again.

No, she wanted to say. When she no longer had that contact with him-when he'd intentionally removed that contact that they had, when before he'd been quite content with it-her heart fell just a little bit, and the knot in her stomach grew just a little bit. "Castle..."

He just stood there, staring at her for what seemed like an eternity, but didn't say a word. Then he took his hands out of his pockets and ran them through his hair as he walked a few steps to stand by a light pole. He leaned heavily against the pole, his body slumping as he looked at the ground.

"Rick, please say something," she implored, walking the few steps to stand by him again.

He still looked at the ground, but he shook his head a little bit. His arm raised, palm up, in a gesture like he was going to articulate something, but then just let it drop down to his side again. But finally, he said, "I don't know what to say. Well, scratch that. I guess one thing does come to mind. I feel like a fool. How's that?"

The self-censure in his words had her gut knotting all over again. And she jumped to his defense, because he didn't seem to want to defend himself. "I don't know why you'd say that. You're not a fool. Not at all."

He laughed, a hollow sound escaping from his mouth. "Yeah, right. You knew," he said into the night air, still sounding almost disbelieving. "You knew how I felt, all that time-all that time, Kate-and you never thought I should know?" He shook his head slowly from side to side. "I...just...I asked, a couple of times, you know?" She nodded, once again being reminded of how she lied to him. "There were a few times I thought that..." he trailed off before shaking his head. "I am so stupid. I feel so stupid now. And pathetic."

Normally, she might have made a joke. But this wasn't normal. "Rick...I'm sorry. I hate saying that, but in a way I can't say it enough. But you're not stupid, not at all. And you're not pathetic."

He looked at her and cocked his eyebrow. "Yeah, right. I confess my innermost feelings to you, and then I didn't even know that you really had heard me. I feel like the geek that wrote the secret love note to the popular head cheerleader and then everyone found out about it. And then I still just kept showing up, and...hoping... I must have looked like such a damn fool, when you knew how I felt all along but I couldn't do anything about it."

She suddenly felt the need to tell him more, even though she'd explained a lot of it already. But that was before her confession, so who even knew if he still remembered after the bombshell she'd just dropped on him?

"Castle, I was so messed up. You...in the cemetery...you were the first thing that I thought of when I woke up. But then throughout everything, I realized that that someone wanted me dead. Someone tried to kill me, and they came this close," she told him, putting her thumb and forefinger almost together to illustrate her point, "to succeeding. And I just couldn't drag you into that. I was being consumed by everything, by my mother's case, by Roy's involvement. And then I was shot. And doctors start quoting recovery in terms of months, not days or weeks. Months. And with the case, I knew I couldn't give you what you needed, or wanted, so I took the easiest way out that I could think of, and I just said that I didn't remember."

Once again, he was back to saying nothing, just staring at the ground, so she forged on. "I truly thought it was for the best. I never wanted you to feel like a fool, or stupid, or anything like that. I just thought...I needed time, and I didn't think I could handle your feelings for me, along with everything else when I was trying recover and make some sense of my life...of what my life had become."

But then she knew she had to get to the present, to why she'd brought him out here on this walk. "And tonight, in thinking of all of that, it hit me that I was behaving a lot like Dylan Laskey. I made decisions after my shooting, and I pushed people away. Getting shot like that...it affected me, profoundly. But I didn't realize...I didn't really realize then that it affected other people a lot too. I was caught up in my own problems, and I was selfish." She made the statement with no sugar-coating, letting it hang out there in the air while she took another breath. "In that warehouse, Roy said that he made mistakes all of those years ago, and he spent the years since then trying to atone for those mistakes. I'm telling you now...I know I made a big mistake in lying to you. I know that now, and I'm coming clean with you, because I know you deserve that. You deserve my honesty, for the way you stuck by me even though I pushed you away. I'm sorry, Rick." She reached out and touched his arm, but after several seconds when he didn't even acknowledge her touch, she let it drop again.

After her speech, she just looked at him, waiting for him to say something. There was more she had to say, more apologizing she knew she had to do, but that could wait. She needed to hear from him first. Finally, after what seemed like hours, he looked up into her eyes. "What do you want me to say, Kate?"

"I don't know, exactly. Can you understand a little bit of what I was feeling back then?"

"Maybe. But can you understand how it feels to say those words to someone, and then find out that that someone has been lying to you for ten months, choosing to ignore those words? Can you understand what I'm feeling right now?"

She winced a bit, hearing the pain in his voice. She nodded. "Yes. I know, or at least I can try to imagine. I did the the selfish thing, the wrong thing before...I know that. But I'm trying to do the right thing now."

His eyes bore into her watery ones for a while, as if he was trying to read her. She sensed that he felt he couldn't read her, like he didn't trust himself anymore. And she did that to him. Where once she wouldn't have wanted him to be able to read her so well, now it seemed that she wanted just the opposite. She wanted him to see that she was telling the truth, that she was sorry, that she realized and deeply regretted the effect that her secret was now having on him. And she told...she got it out in the open. But now, his eyes told her that he just didn't trust her, not right now, and he really didn't trust his own interpretations of her.

"Rick..." she started again, at the same time as he pushed his body off the lightpole.

He held up a hand. "I think I need to be alone, Kate." At his words, her repaired heart figuratively fell to the ground. "I need to process this. Try to find a way that I don't feel like such a damn idiot."

"God, Castle. I told you that this is my fault, okay? So stop beating yourself up." And she didn't want him to leave, not now, not like this.

"Oh, I know it's your fault. Well, not getting shot, but keeping...you know...from me." He'd kept it bottled up for so long since that day in the cemetery that he found he couldn't easily voice the words again. And he didn't want to; it hurt too much to think about them. "But I still feel the way I feel, and simple apologies and assigning blame aren't going to make the feelings go away just like that," he told her, snapping his fingers for emphasis.

He walked a few steps away from her, but then turned around again. "I'll call you. And yes, those are the same words you said to me in your hospital room. But now that I know what it feels like, I can tell you that I won't keep you waiting for four months."

She deserved that. And what he spoke was the absolute truth anyway, so even though it hurt, she couldn't fault him for saying it because she probably would have said the same thing. "Castle...Rick...I am sorry. And I...what you said back then..." She looked down and swallowed, trying to keep the emotion at bay. "Please know that it meant a lot. It really did. And it...uh...still does," she finished softly.

And with that, he nodded at her in dismissal and started walking away from her down the street.

Thanks for reading! Where do you think they'll go now? Now don't forget...please pass on your feedback. Much Happy Castle Fairy Dust will rain down upon those who do!