From Latte to Love
Chapter Two
She looks at him and sighs. It's hard to let anyone in anymore. Her heart is behind a wall that she's not sure she can ever bring back down. Her mom is dead and her father is a drunk. And as much as she wants to walk away from him and the only home she's ever known, she can't. She can't leave him to the slow death he's determined to bring himself. "Kate." Rick says softly
All of that is running through her head when he speaks. She looks up and something in his eyes and voice makes her want to spend one night not worried about her mom's murder, her Dad's drinking and the fact that she's completely lost. "It's only dinner." He says quietly.
"Alright, Mr. Castle."
"It's Rick." He replies his tone changing.
"I better not end up on page six."
"I'm not nearly as popular as my exploits on page six suggests."
"Loose a little bit of popularity with your fangirls after stealing the horse."
"Read the Richard Castle website much." He smirks and she looks away. She doesn't really want him to know how much if a fan she's become.
"It was on the news Mr. Castle."
"A small clip on the late, late news, the night it happened, no mention of fan girls." He replies, still smirking and she looks away again. "So our date, is tomorrow okay."
"Can I let you know?" She asks, wondering what condition she'll find her father in when she gets home.
"Sure, here." He says, pulling out his businesses card.
She reaches for the card and as she grasps it their fingers brush and she feel a spark tingle through her fingertips. "I'll call you." She mumbles and he nods. He felt the tingle to but decides not to mention it. "Bye. Mr. Castle."
"Until then, and you can call me Rick." He turns to leaves before she can reply. She shakes her head before she continues into the subway.
She's lucky when she reaches the subway. The train isn't that full and she able to find a seat. She in good shape but eight hours in her feet with only one thirty minute break and her feet are feeling sore and tired. She settles back into her seat, resting her head against the window. "One thing about it, if she was Richard Castle's girlfriend she wouldn't need to stand on her feet for eight hours a day." She thinks and the suck in a breath. "I'm not his girlfriend or one of his fangirls." She mutters to herself. Three stops later, she strides off the train, determined to be alone.
Winding her way through the crowd, she make her way home. Stopping at the corner store to pick up at least a few items to make some semblance of a meal for her and her father. Since her mother's death six months ago, family meal times have become a rarely seen occurrence in their apartment. Most nights it's takeout and struggling to get her nearly passed out father to his bedroom. She hates what their lives have become but she can't see anyway it changes without her father stopping his drinking.
Opening the front door, she enters to a quiet and dark apartment. Part of her is relieved that her father doesn't seem to be home. She really shouldn't feel that way, but she does. Setting the bags on the counter, she walks down the hallway to her room. Untying the apron that's at her waist, she pulls out her tucked in uniform shirt as she sits down on the bed. Tugging her shoes off, she kicks them under her bed and then stands up. Pulling her shirt off, she tosses it towards the pile of dirty uniforms. She needs to do a load of laundry. Pulling open a drawer on her dresser she takes out a pair of yoga pants and a soft t-shirt. She's pulling the shirt down when she hears the apartment door open. "I'm changing Dad. Give me a minute and I'll have us something to eat." She gathers up the dirty laundry and walks to her bedroom door. Opening it she doesn't see his fist until it connects with the side of her head and she stumbles back and to the side, hitting her head on the doorframe. It's a few seconds before it registers what just happened. Turning, she looks up and sees her father standing in her doorway, glaring at her. "What did you do with them?" He asks, slurring his words.
"What did I do with what?"
"Don't play like you don't know what I'm talking about?" He says, slurring his speech more as he reaches for her head and pulls her up by her hair. "I want them back, all of them."
"I don't know what you're talkā¦" He slaps her so hard against the cheek that it snaps her head back and to the side as she falls against the bed.
"I want them back, all of them." He slurs, reeling back and into the doorframe before he stumbles out of her room, leaving her lying in the floor, stunned, bleeding form a busted lip, her head pounding from the punch and slap, and crying so hard she can't see the door in front of her. She tenses as she hears him careen into the wall just down the hallway. And for several minutes she waits for him to come back. He never comes.
For hours she huddles her bed, so incredibly scared to move. Will he come back and hurt her more. That man wasn't her father. Her father never laid a finger on her, even threw her rebel years, before Stanford, before her mother was murdered. She cries harder and that only intensifies the pain in her head and jaw. Somewhere around midnight, she edges her way off her bed. Quietly going to her closet, she opens the door and grabs the small duffle bag she brought home with her from Stanford. Stuffing some clothes inside, she grabs a few essentials from her dresser and then leaning down, she has to brace herself as a wave of dizziness washes over her. Closing her eyes for a moment, she waits till it passes before she pulls her shoes out and tugs them on. Grabbing the duffel, she quietly walks up to her open door and pausing for a moment she cautiously sticks her head out, fear slicing through her as she waits for another punch. It doesn't come.
Quietly she enters the hallway, and slowly she inches her way down the hall till she reaches the open living area, its pitch black and she has no idea where her father went. Was he even still in the apartment? She doesn't remember hearing the front door open, but then she was sort of out of it. Inching her way through the living room, she makes the front hallway. In the dark she feels around for her purse and every sound she makes causes her to cringe with fear. Finally she finds her purse and keys, clinching them tightly so they don't rattle, she feels for the door knob and slowly twists it. Relief flows over her as it releases and she pulls it open. She slips out and then leans against the door frame sucking in a breath. With her eyes closed, she quietly pushes the key into the lock and locks the door. "I'm sorry Daddy." She whispers and with tears in her eyes she turns away, staggering down the hallway to the elevator because she can't see clearly. She's crying to hard.
After leaving Kate, Rick runs a few errands. Things he's put off while spending all his free time at the coffee shop observing Kate. He's glad she agreed to have dinner with him. He knows she could've blown him off. His reputation would've hindered something he's fairly sure will be extraordinary. But she didn't so he's almost walking on air by the time he gets back to his loft. Glancing at the clock, he's a little surprised he hasn't heard from Kate. Reaching for his phone, he wakes it up to find no missed calls or texts. Sighing, he lays the phone down after he makes sure that the ringer is turned up.
Going into his office, he pulls up the document he was working on at the shop before Kate interrupted him. Derek is out of the rehab center but he still hasn't figured out if he's going to continue with the. Agency or go back to his private eye business. As Rick settles in to write a few more pages when an idea hits him. To bring a character such as Kate into this story and so he begin to write, introducing a new character to replace Clara. A stronger character, with intelligence and loyalty. Completely different character to Clara. It's an hour and a half later when he's drawn from his writing by the ringing of his phone. Grabbing it, he answers it. "Hello."
"Hi Daddy." Alexis says, sounding tired but happy.
"Hi pumpkin, how's California? Are you having fun?"
"Sure Daddy, Gram and I had our girl's day after she picked me up from daycare this morning."
"Where's your mother?"
"She has auditions all day. So she found this nice little school for me to go to. I like it."
"That's good. Did you learn anything?" He looks at the clock on his computer and realizes that he's spent the last three hours wrapped up in the world if Derek and his new companion. He's not sure how this will turn out but he's fairly certain he wants the character to remain in the series. Quickly saving his work, he gets up and pauses to stretch out his back before he leaves his office.
"I learned a new song, it's supposed to help us count to ten, but I already know how to do that. But the rest of the kids don't so we all have to learn the song."
"So what's the new song?"
"Do you want to sing it for me?" Alexis begins singing the song about John Brown and his little Indians. She stops at the first run through of the song. "Daddy, who is John Brown?"
"Well, I'm not really sure if he's a real person in the song, but in American history there was a man during the American Civil War that tried to make slavery illegal in the new frontier states."
"How did he do that?"
"He hurt some people to try force the government to make slavery illegal." Rick's replies.
"What is slavery?" Alexis asks.
Walking over to the couch, he takes a moment to consider how to explain slavery to a four year old. "A long, long time ago, men would go to Africa and they would bring men back over on ships." He pauses again. "You remember the market we went to in the Hampton's last fall?" He asks, and Alexis nods. "Well, when the ships would get into the harbor, there would be a market and other men would come in and they would look at the men brought over from Africa and they would buy them, like we bought those Christmas decorations at the market."
"I don't understand."
"I know, it's sort of a hard concept to understand. These men that were brought from Africa were bought at the market and they were taken to their new homes and they would work for the man that bought them."
"Did they ever get to go back to Africa?"
"No, they couldn't go anywhere because they belonged to the man that bought them at the market. The only way they could leave was if their master, the man that bought them, gave them papers saying that they were free, then they could leave. But if they didn't have the papers and they tried to leave, they would get into serious trouble if they were caught leaving."
"Like going to bed without supper, or time out, like Ms. Johnson gives time outs to Micah?"
"No, more serious trouble than that. Some of them were whipped." Alexis gasps, shocked. "Some were killed if they refused to go back to their master."
"But they only wanted to go home, I'm sure they missed their Grams and their daddy. I would miss you if someone one took me away from you and Gram."
"I would miss you too. And I will never leave you, remember that."
"I will."
"Do you have any more questions about the song?"
She pauses for a minute. "How long did it last?"
"A very long time, almost a hundred years." He says and her eyes get huge.
"Why did it stop?"
"There was a man, named Abraham Lincoln. He was elected President. And while he was running for President, the southern states of America said that if he was elected they would secede from the Union and we would be two countries."
"You mean like Florida would be in a different country."
"Yes."
"So Disneyland would've been in another country?"
"Well, Disneyland wasn't around then, but yes, if the Confederacy would've won the Civil War."
"Why was there a war?"
"Like I said, when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency the southern states threaten to secede, South Carolina was the first and then eleven more states followed and for four years the North and the South fought against each other. Then on April 9th 1865, the general of the Confederate Army Robert E Lee surrendered to the Union general Ulysses S. Grant and that ended the Civil War."
"And that ended slavery?"
"Not exactly, after Abraham Lincoln was re-elected, he made a proclamation ending slavery, but the war still went on, and many of the slaves once they heard about the proclamation they left the places they were living."
"Did they go back to Africa?"
"I guess some might've, but most of them couldn't read or write and they didn't have any money, some volunteered to fight in the War, some were forced to fight in the war. After the war, many were promised forty acres and a mule, but even though they were free, most of the south still treated them as though they were slaves and there were many laws that were put into place to keep them from making a better life for themselves and their families. You'll learn more and more about this when you get older though. I think it's time that I talked to Grams."
"Okay Daddy, I love you."
"I loved you too, Pumpkin." Alexis gives the phone back to Martha. Once Martha's on the phone, Rick says. "She has her enrolled in daycare?"
"She does. It's not a bad place. Several other stars have their kids enrolled there."
"The whole point was for her to spend time with her daughter."
"I'm not defending her, but she is a working mother Richard, and she has to have some place safe for Alexis when she's at an audition."
"Okay, but you approve of this daycare."
"It's fine."
"Are you okay?" Richard asks, there's something in her tone that doesn't ring quite right with him.
"I'm fine." Before he can ask anything else. Martha says. "We're headed Meredith's."
"You're sure everything is okay?"
"It's all well and good." Martha replies. "We'll call again tomorrow night. Do you want to say good-bye?"
"Yes." Richard says, Martha hands the phone back to Alexis. She spends a few more minutes telling Rick good night before they hang up. Once off the phone, he's quick to realize that Kate still hasn't called him. Reaching for the phone again, he decides to get dinner.
After their pizza is delivered he settles in for a movie while he waits for Kate's call. As the credits roll on Star Wars, it's not the same without Alexis there to watch it with him. He looks at his phone, hoping it will ring. It doesn't and the sadder thing is, he doesn't have a way to call Kate.
