I'm standing heart breaking
And you just walk away
-"Walk Away"
Peter Bradley Adams
Castle stares dumbly after her.
What just happened?
She walked out on him. After coming to his apartment to tell him…what?
Oh god.
He never gave her the chance.
The moment he saw her standing outside his door, her posture stiff, the lines of her body taut with—tension? Or did he misread it? —he received a shock, the jolt of electricity at her propinquity. He had let her come in, taken her coat, touched the nape of her neck leaving the whorls of his fingerprints against her skin. A tattoo or a brand. Or maybe a reminder.
He asked if she wanted to sit and fleetingly she had looked trapped, a skittish animal cornered. But then she had moved to the couch, her eyes liquid mercury—dark, rich, volatile—and he had placed physical distance between them, to keep him from doing something stupid.
Like touch her.
His heart had been somewhere around the vicinity of his toes. He felt just a little nauseous.
He had left her. Reality slapped him hard, soft bone against concrete.
Last night he had done the very thing she had convinced herself that he would always do. He had proven her point Q.E.D.
And all he had been after was the truth, just a little bit of a concession on her part so that he knew where he stood. He just wanted something, anything, so that he could begin to heal too.
But he had handled it all wrong, had lost the script sometime after the first act and had attempted to wing it.
What a fool.
He watched her gather herself, a pillar of marble against the leather of his couch and when she lifted her eyes to meet his, he saw the eddy of pain in their depths. It made him physically hurt to see it, an ache that burrowed deep, rooting into his bones like termites.
"Castle about last night…" she had begun and her voice was raw, excavated.
He could not hear what she was going to say, how she was going to end them. How she was going to cut that tether, no longer able to let him bungee back. Soon to be just one continuous plummet.
He had to forestall her, if only so he didn't have to actually acknowledge the reality of her words. So he didn't have to have them on a permanent loop in his brain when she left, a Victrola that never ran down.
He kept his voice even, so she couldn't hear how it was actually chapped beyond belief. "No, Kate. It's done. Don't do this again."
"No Castle listen," and he heard the pleading tone, like she needed to unburden all her reasons before she left his life completely. He couldn't have that, couldn't have his last memory be of her breaking him.
So again he cut her off, again kept his voice even, kept everything out of his eyes and told her a partial truth. "I can't keep doing this Kate, I can't keep being in this holding pattern with you any longer. It's too much."
She grabbed a pillow from the couch then, in response to his words, not bothering to look for those that were hidden by invisible ink. She pressed the pillow to her chest, a protective barrier from him, from them. He watched her eyes, the conflagration of anger. Watched her jaw set, the lines of her face cut sharp. It tore into him and he had to remind himself that this woman could cut him.
"No one is asking you to Castle. If I remember correctly, it wasn't my suggestion that you stick around. It wasn't me that wanted to be your muse. You barged your way into my life!" The anger scraped her voice, made it hard, ignited his own.
He raised an eyebrow in contempt, refused to believe the words she had just said.
Apparently that only made it worse. She had tossed the pillow from her, discarded it from her life like he was.
"This was a mistake. All of it. You said you were done Castle? Well guess what? So am I."
He watched her bolt for the door, her hand clenched against her mouth.
And he felt his world disintegrate. Again. The second time in two days.
His heart a bloody mess, pulpy, a paste made of his mistakes.
What had he done?
