The ER nurse assigned to him, "Debbie", she introduces herself as, "but you can call me Deb," leads them down a short corridor and into the interior of the emergency services wing. This time, they walk side-by-side instead of one in front of the other as they step through doorways. An unspoken, seemingly subconscious compromise.

No one is taking the lead. They're in this together. Partners, as it should be.

At first glance, the ER doesn't appear to be very busy. There's a number of patients in double rooms all by themselves and it seems like the majority of the people inside the emergency wing are just friends or family members of whomever is being treated. A lot of doctors and nurses are just standing around engaging in small talk and there's no chaos or hustle or bustle. Kate takes that as a positive sign.

Under these conditions, it shouldn't take too long for Castle to get a few stitches put in and be on their way out the door, right? The longer they put off the talking, the more uncertain she feels that things will be truly resolved between them.

He was furious with her, that much was clear from his biting words before, but Castle's whole demeanor towards her seems to have taken a 180° turn since the argument. It gives her some hope, but she recognizes that pain and anger of that magnitude isn't going to dissipate so quickly. Of course, she's mad at him, too, for shutting her out, for his lack of faith in her, in them. In the very least, now he knows the truth; knows that he assumed wrong about her feelings towards him. That helps, but she'd be lying to herself if she said that she didn't have lingering doubts or fears swirling around in her head.

As she walks, her heels sound more like they're merely shuffling along the ground rather than the usual click-clack heard when she strides across hard floors. It's close to midnight, and after an agonizing weekend and three full days of work with the tension between them persisting, she's feeling entirely devoid of energy, simply drained of it as though someone has stuck her with a lancet and sapped her vitality away. It probably doesn't help that the only thing that's been in her stomach over the course of the past several hours is some coffee she had at the precinct (which she's had to procure for herself for an entire week) and some shots she had during the drink with Colin.

Vodka. Lots of vodka. It's both a blessing and a curse tonight that she can hold her liquor so well. She had wanted to dull the pain, numb it away, but when that didn't work, it led her on this path, straight back to him. For that, she's grateful, though they still have a long way before things can go back to the way they were.

The way they were? No. There's no going back now, is there? Once they lay down their cards, once they put everything down on the table, it's all going to change, isn't it? Nothing will be the same. Whether that change will be good or bad all depends on if they can manage to move past this colossal, collective hurt.

Once they're led into a room, Castle is ushered into a sitting position on the edge of the bed and Kate takes a seat in a chair on the opposite side of the bed's medical gadgetry. Deb starts the process of checking his vitals, wrapping the blood pressure monitor around his upper arm and letting it go about its business with the press of a button. When she sets the pulse oximeter over his index finger, the beeping signal sounds in rapid succession with his heart rate.

"Do you have a history of hypertension, Mr. Castle?" Deb asks after she scribbles in some numbers on his chart and tugs the cuff off his arm, the velcro tearing apart with a rip.

Both he and Kate startle, sharing a look with one another before turning to Deb, questions in their eyes.

"Uh, not that I know of," he edges warily. "Why? Is there something wrong?"

"It could just be from the injury or something salty you ate this evening, but your blood pressure is elevated," she explains, pointing to the machine with her pen. "You're at 140 over 90."

"Wow."

"Have you been under a lot of stress recently?"

That might be putting it mildly. He risks a glance over at Kate and she's looking guilty as sin, regret and apology both radiating from her green eyes. It stings to see it, and he wishes he could just reach out and hold her in his arms, tell her it's not her fault, but he doesn't. Later, he'd told her. They'd talk about this all later. No distractions, no disruptions. Definitely with no nurses in the room with them.

"I work with the homicide division of the NYPD on a regular basis. It has it's moments," he tells Nurse Deb with a smile, making light of it all in typical Castle fashion. Kate sees right through it, his not-so subtle attempt to set her at ease in light of being unable to address her directly. It doesn't work. Can't. Things just aren't that simple.

Deb continues on with the conversation, completely oblivious to the strained looks being shared between the other two people in the room with her.

"Oh my. Well, I can certainly see how that might affect things, wouldn't it? Especially that bombing last week. We had a few of the injured ones transported here. It was terrible."

Castle's cheery expression drops from his face at the same time Kate's eyes fall shut and she sighs, a ragged, anguished breath of air. The heels of her hands run up the sides of her cheeks, fingertips briefly stroking over her temples before moving on to brush her hair back from her face, palms circling back to her cheeks again.

The complications are just never-ending.

"Yeah," Castle says, this time feigning his smile in order to keep a tight lid on the agony that wants to explode out of him, too. "Yeah, that was a rough one."

Kate's head droops, locks of her hair falling into her face and Castle feels his heart plummet.

This isn't going well at all.

"All right, well I've got all your information here down on the chart. Doctor Wagner will be in to see you shortly. If you need anything at all, just press the call button," the nurse says, still completely oblivious and far too cheerful.

Castle thanks her and once she's out of the room, he curls his legs up onto the bed, throws his head back roughly onto the elevated section of the mattress and very audibly groans out an "Ow" at the pain that shoots through his skull.

"Castle!" Kate hisses, lurching forward in her seat to grab at his shoulder and upper arm, tugging him upright and away from the back of the bed. "Geez, will you be careful? You're in bad enough shape as it is because of—"

"Stop."

He takes it back; it can't wait until later. Not at this rate.

"I know what you're thinking, but don't."

"How can I not? What's going on between us is affecting your health. You're stressed out to the point of high blood pressure because of me."

Castle lets out an exasperated sigh and swings his legs over to the other side of the bed so that he can face her. She looks up at him, fatigued, discontented, wishing things could be different right now. Wishing that every time she opens her mouth to say something, it didn't feel like it was going to make or break them.

"I'm fine, Kate." She rolls her eyes and he scrubs at his face in frustration. "Okay, yeah, we've been at odds for a while but we were just arguing not even ten minutes ago. Of course my blood pressure is up. I bet if we strapped that thing on your arm it'd be the same result for you, too."

"That's really not making me feel any better about this, Castle—"

"My point is..." he says, cutting her off with a wave of his hand, much like she had done to him earlier. "I'm as much at fault in this as you are. We both made some stupid decisions that hurt each other. It's not just you. Not just me."

"It wasn't my intention to hurt you," she says quietly, gripping onto the sleeve of his jacket. "I don't ever want to hurt you."

"I know," he replies, and when she lifts her eyes to give him a disbelieving look, "Well, I do now."

She worries the fabric of his jacket between her thumb and forefinger as she gathers her next words. She has to get them right, has to make them count.

"Running away and shutting you out...Look, I know it was stupid, but lying to you—it was the only way I could think of to keep what we have. At least until I was ready to face everything."

He reaches out, uncurling her fingers from his jacket so that he can take her hand and her breath catches in her chest when he runs the pad of his thumb along her knuckle, a soothing caress.

"I'm not gonna say it doesn't still hurt, or that I'm not mad, because it does and I am. I just...I wish you could have trusted me with your heart more and told me everything from the beginning."

She tips her head low, staring at the floor and nods once. She understands that, now more than ever after being on the receiving end of the same thing. He'd done the same to her when he heard her talking to Bobby. He didn't come to her with his thoughts, his feelings. He bottled it all up and ran.

Running doesn't work, doesn't fix anything. Running from their feelings only causes pain, and neither one of them wants to hurt from this anymore.

"I could hardly get through a single day back then without spiraling out, Castle, and I'm not trying to justify or excuse what I did, because it was wrong. I was so wrong. But you have to understand, I thought I was protecting you. Protecting us. I couldn't let myself bring you down into that rabbit hole with me. I couldn't ask you flat out to wait when I had no idea how long it'd take for me to be okay again, to work through it all."

"I would have waited, Kate. No matter how long it took, I would have waited for you until you were ready if you'd just told me that that's what you needed."

He cups her cheek with his hand, his fingers brushing along the soft skin beneath her eyes and they flutter shut at his touch.

"You know how I feel about you," he murmurs, and she closes her hand over his, holds him there, nods.

It makes something flutter in her chest when she opens her eyes again and sees the way he looks at her, all warmth and devotion. All love. Seeing it again after being without it for so long makes her realize just how much she's needed him, how much her sense of happiness has become rooted in sharing her life with this man who loves her and whom she loves so dearly. When he's unhappy, she's unhappy, and when he walked away this time, even despite still being physically there but so far removed from her emotionally, the void left in her heart was almost more than she could bear.

She never wants to be apart from him like that again.

"Whatever you need, if it's time, space, whatever, I'll give it to you if that's what it takes. If you want to be with me—"

"I do," she says quickly. "More than anything."

He smiles vibrantly, her words at long last refilling the gaping hole that had been excavated in his heart that day in the observation room. He dips down, descends upon her, but once she's convinced that he's intent on hugging her, or kissing her, she's really not sure which, she twists at the last second, turns her head away from him. His nose touches to her cheek instead, a feather-light touch.

"Wait," she warns, and he lingers, unmoving.

"Kate," her name tumbles from his mouth in a soft plea of confusion but she shakes her head side to side, her brows tightly knit, her expression strained.

"Don't. Not here."

He cradles her face between both of his palms, tilting her back to face him and she melts into him, bumping her forehead to his, their breaths mingling in soft exhalations. She tips her head slightly into one of his hands to look up at him somberly from just a breath away.

"I'm gonna lose it, Castle. If someone walks in here...if something else gets in the way again, I'm just going to lose it."

He grins, chuckles at her even, and although it irritates her that he's finding her aggravation endearing, it's still the most uplifting thing she's seen or heard from him in almost two weeks. She's missed that smile, that laugh. He looks like himself again, not the façade he'd been walking around as recently.

"Maybe we can take it in bite-size pieces for now," he says softly, "Just until we can get around to the whole enchilada."

She tries to suppress a smile at his use of the idiom in this context but sniffs a laugh when he starts waggling his eyebrows at her, giving her that goofy and ridiculous grin of his. To his surprise and joyous elation, she turns into his hand and brushes her lips to the heel of his palm, a ghost of a kiss to his skin.

"I-I uh...I'll take that as a yes?" he stammers. How easily she can turn him from so bold to simply a puddle in just a single touch. She'd feel empowered by it if she weren't so scared and on edge about everything between them still.

"I am kind of hungry," she murmurs against his skin, turning her eyes back to him, affectionate and alluring all at once. "I guess I could settle for a couple of bites."

He gapes at her a moment, but when she looks up at him through her eyelashes and flashes him that come-hither smile, her beautiful eyes shining now in a manner unlike anything he's seen on her before, Castle finds himself unable to hold back any longer. God he loves her. He inwardly kicks himself because it's true what she said before—how did he convince himself into thinking that this woman all but loved him?

How, when she's looking at him like that?

"Kate, I don't think I can wait anymore," he confesses suddenly, his breath coming out faster, his heart racing in his chest with need, desire. "I don't want to wait anymore."

Her gaze softens upon him and she nuzzles into his cheek with her nose, eyes falling shut and just letting herself revel in the warmth of his skin on hers, his scent enveloping her senses. It's been so long since they've been this close. Close enough to feel, close enough to touch.

"You won't have to," she promises, palming his cheek, feeling his faint stubble as the pads of her fingers trace down to his chin, back up his jawline. He shivers at her touch, sucks in a breath when her lips graze the shell of his ear, a soft whisper. "No more waiting."

She doesn't have to tell him twice. He stands, tugs her to her feet and wraps her in his arms, his grip on her so tight that he can feel the pounding of her heart in her chest, beating in time against his own. Kate embraces him, holding onto him desperately as though they are two lovers who had been separated for years and have just been reunited at the end of a long journey.

He buries his nose into her hair, taking in her familiar and all-too enticing scent, then he pulls back, a look of urgency on his face.

"Kate I-," he starts, and in that fraction of a second, she can see the words forming on his tongue, "I lo—"

Framing his face with her hands, she swallows his words down, capturing his lips to silence him in a forceful kiss. It's over much too soon for his liking, but god she just kissed him and you'll hear no complaints from him on that front. He sways a little, has to grip onto her to steady himself, keep his balance.

"Shhh," she shushes him, her mouth still entirely too close for him to focus on much else. "Bite-sized, Castle. Bite-sized, remember?"

"R-right," he says breathlessly. He subconsciously licks his lips and tastes the cherry=flavored lip gloss left in the wake of her mouth on his. Her velvet-soft, luscious mouth. It's going to be a long night in this emergency room waiting to taste her again.

"That would be the rest of the enchilada, wouldn't it?" he says finally, chuckling nervously.

She nods, smiling sweetly at him. "Yes, it would."

"But you know, Kate. You know."

The smile on her face blooms even brighter and she presses on his shoulders, guiding him back to a seated position on the bed. Leaning down, her lips feather a kiss at the corner of his mouth, quick but tender.

"Yeah, Castle," she whispers, running her thumb across his lower lip to wipe away the remnants of her lip gloss this time. "I know."