Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

I could write a preface on how we met
So the world would never forget.
 —Lorenz Hart

Is that all right? An okay beginning? She's already a Swiss cheese of insecurities and she has written exactly two sentences. How the hell does Castle do this, anyway?

She wonders if she should switch to a pencil, so she could erase things. Crossing things out with a pen is so messy. She has a nice cedar pencil that is infused with lily of the valley, so it smells heavenly. On the other hand, crossing things out implies critical thinking, revisions—it's so writerly. Well, she's not dropping the idea of a pencil yet. It's good to have options. Maybe she should go in and find that scented one, which she's pretty sure is in an old jam jar next to the kitchen phone.

Two minutes later, after retrieving the pencil and sharpening it to a perfect point, she's heading for her father's little work room. Yeah, there it is, some very fine sandpaper. She makes a few passes over the pencil to bring out the flowery smell, and holds it under her nose: ahhhhh, yum. But then she brings the pencil down and shakes her head: ahhhhh, shit. She has written—she counts in her head—all of twenty-six words and she's already procrastinating? Suck it up, Kate. If it didn't hurt so much to stomp back to the deck, she would. Instead, she settles for a moderately-less-shuffling-than-yesterday walk, sits down in her chair and puts the incriminatory pencil on the table. She'll stick to the pen. For now.

"When he first walked into her life, it was less of a walk than an invasion. He was a cocky bastard, and he all but crowed. Oh, yeah, cock of the walk, all right. That expression could have been invented just for him.

"A young woman had been murdered, her body posed in a style that was straight out of one of his books. She—Detective Kate Beckett, NYPD—went to the fancy rooftop party for his latest mystery to question him—Richard Castle, writer—to see if he knew anything, had any ideas. Beckett still remembers his opening line: he was waving a Sharpie at her, the one he had just been using to sign the surgically enhanced breasts of a bunch of giggling partygoers, and asked her, 'Where would you like it?' Yeah, well her completely natural breasts were covered up, thanks. Had she not been brought up to be polite, were she not an officer of the law, she'd have told him exactly where she'd like that Sharpie: pointed end up, directly into an orifice in his body, not hers.

"He drove her insane on that case. He was totally unprofessional, made all kinds of suggestive remarks from the other side of the table after she hauled him in to the precinct. He stole papers from her desk, for which she arrested him in the New York Public Library. And he liked it! The ass thought it was hilarious when he should have been, at the very least, chagrined. And then, before the paperwork on the case was done, Castle was permanently installed next to her desk. His good buddy the I-have-him-on-speed-dial mayor had spoken to the brass and gotten them to agree to let Castle shadow her. For research. For a book.

"He really did drive her crazy, case after case, that first year. Part of what made her insane—which she is admitting now under self-administered oath, because she has pledged from this day forward to be honest with him—was that he was really helpful. He had fifty ideas for every one of hers. They were juvenile, stupid, freaky, hubristic, and outlandish, but they were also provocative in the best sense. Castle provoked Beckett into thinking a different way, to look at every element of a homicide investigation from a different angle. Sometimes one of his ideas was outright brilliant. But she didn't dare tell him, or he'd have spent the rest of the day preening those gorgeous cock feathers of his."

She gasps and drops the pen as if it had given her a 500-volt shock. She wrote that? She can't even look at those words, gorgeous and cock, side by side, without blushing. Without all sorts of images flooding her brain and staying there. No amount of shaking her head will dislodge them. Should she include that, as part of the book, or omit it? Four paragraphs into her project and she has a new respect for Castle and what he does. What's in, what's out, where's the balance? Where's the cadence and the form and the tension and the continuity? What's off, what's on? She throws down the pen and rubs both hands across her face. She needs some coffee, but she can't. Her nerves are shot.

She walks to the kitchen, takes a bottle of water from the fridge, and rests gingerly against the counter for a moment before walking back outside. Walking, she thinks, as she sits down again. She has to write about how Castle walks. She puts her iPod earbuds back in and calls up a live performance of Harry Connick Jr. singing "I Could Write a Book," which she chose over the one he had done years before for the soundtrack of When Harry Met Sally. They're both swingy, but the live one is much more romantic, so committed. So much the way she's feeling right now. She likes the sound of "walk" when Connick sings it here, with a suggestion of a caress. She opens her notebook.

"Beckett was always interested in the way Castle walked. His gait was self-assured, but sometimes it had an almost undetectable underlay of hesitancy. She was surprised when she first noticed it, near the end of the first year that they worked together. He always seemed so confident, and his walk reflected it, but that was a case that hit close to home for him. A little girl had been kidnapped, and kidnappings so often have the worst possible outcome. He had to have been thinking constantly about Alexis during the investigation. That anxiety would account for some of the hesitancy, but not all of it. The rest was Castle's reaction to the appearance of FBI agent Will Sorenson, her former boyfriend. You could have made a sandwich out of the testosterone those two emanated.

"But honestly? What Beckett loves most is when Castle is walking and then turns partway, his feet planted on the floor, to say something sweet or funny to her. It's the way his hips tilt and his shoulders pull back a little. It's as if his body is asking a question and laughing at the same. It's seductive. Very seductive. Like Harry Connick's 'walk'.

"And what about talk? Does anyone talk as much as Castle? The Chatty Cathy doll that Beckett's mother had owned when she was a girl, and which she had saved for Kate, was reticent compared to Castle. Beckett used to stare at the back his head to see if there was a pull string nestled in that thick hair of his that activated his nonstop talking. Funny, but somewhere in the course of their unusual partnership, she stopped minding his loquaciousness. She'd been something of a Chatty Cathy herself, before. Before her mother's murder shut her down. Beckett is almost sure that she knows when she began to love the way Castle talks. It was last year, when they went to interview that skeevy sports agent, Bobby Fox, after the murder of his client Cano Vega. She had used the word veritable, and Castle called her sexy for it. He meant it, she could tell. She flirted with him by saying 'You should hear me say "fallacious",' but she also melted. She was suddenly a big mush ball, and thank God he hadn't realized it. He was probably too busy running 'fallacious' through the X-rated part of his imagination.

"When Castle's talking moves down a notch, when it morphs into a sinuous whisper, she has a hard time controlling her breathing. It's as though his whisper is a conduit for endorphins, sending them straight into her bloodstream. A couple of times he has whispered something and his breath hit the erogenous zone just below her ear. She'd been halfway to an orgasm before she managed to excuse herself and calmed down in the ladies room."

Kate stops writing. If Castle only knew what she occasionally had to resort to in the ladies room. Nah, he has a great imagination, she doesn't have to spell it out. But when he reads this, will he start whispering all the time? Now that he knows her secret? Oh, what the hell, she wouldn't mind being in that semi-orgasmic state a lot. Or better, a complete orgasmic state, in the bed where she shouldn't sleep. This isn't the best time to be having such thoughts, when there's nothing that can be done about them. Besides, she has to write about the way he looks. She had listened to Tony Bennett's "I Could Write a Book" already, but she takes another swig of water and returns to it briefly. It's the way he sings "look." He whispers it, lets it float out into the ether. It could be circling the cabin right now. Looooooook, very delicate on the K. Spellbinding. Well. She bends over her notebook.

"Castle likes to say that he is ruggedly handsome. Beckett pretends to scoff, but he's right. And he's wrong. Because he's definitely handsome, but he's not really rugged. He's solid, he's sexily massive, but he's not outdoorsy or tough. Beckett thinks his eyes are everything. They're a very changeable blue, and very expressive. They crinkle when he laughs. She will never forget, can't imagine it ever fading from her memory bank, the way his eyes looked one night last winter, when he and she were pretending to be a drunk couple so that they could get by the man who was guarding Hal Lockwood's filthy warehouse. Castle grabbed her face and kissed her the way no one had ever kissed her before. It wasn't his lips and his mouth and a trace of his tongue, much as they did everything to her, but his eyes. The longing in them. The trust in them. The light in them. The passion in them. And she did him such a disservice, has been doing him such a disservice, by refusing to acknowledge everything that was in his eyes and in that kiss. He showed up in her apartment a few months later and challenged her about it, accused her of burying herself in her mother's murder, and she still wouldn't talk about it. Wouldn't give in to those eyes that were angry and wounded and still full of love. She wouldn't trust him, and that's all he had asked. Looked at her with those beautiful eyes, and she wouldn't do it. She told him they were over when they hadn't even begun, not really."

Kate sighs, and turns her notebook facedown on the table. This wasn't the direction that she had meant to take. This part should have been fun and light, and it had started out that way. And then it had taken a sharp turn, like the middle act of a three-act play. What if her book—if she can even presume to call it a book—isn't enough? What if she sends it to Castle and he returns it, unopened? She hates herself, and now she's crying, on the deck of the cabin where things used to be very happy and her mother played American standards like "I Could Write a Book" and they sang them together.

TBC

A/N Don't worry, things will get better. Thank you very much for the reviews, faves and follows! They're cheering me on.