So One Man
When they finally get into her apartment, Kate drops her keys and laptop, the files and the report from the private investigator, just leaves it all in the entry. Behind her, Castle gives that frustrated sigh she's so tired of hearing, and she ignores it and sheds her shoes as she goes.
"No, don't worry. I got it," he says a little too acidic for her liking, but she's on a roll with this ignoring thing and she heads resolutely to her bedroom as he picks up after her.
They haven't been back to her apartment since... since two weeks ago? Maybe longer. Pit-stops and coming back for clothes and not much else.
"I'll get us some dinner," he calls out, an apology for snapping at her.
She half turns in the threshold of her bedroom, sees him across the space - too much space between them lately, stressed and overworked and scared despite the determination. "I don't think I've got anything edible," she murmurs back, an offering in and of itself.
He gives her apartment a swift look and nods, accepting it. "I'll poke around; see what I can find."
"You're good at that," she says softly now, giving him a tired smile even as she fumbles with the buttons of her shirt.
"Good at that too," he says back, coming towards her with his hands out. He takes over at her buttons and slips them free slowly, his eyes on hers and hers staring back, the connection and the promise and the support. He leans in and presses his mouth to her collarbone; her breath catches and her hand comes to his neck, her bones dissolving.
"Castle," she murmurs, closing her eyes because the sight of him bent over her makes her want things. "I miss you."
"I'm here," he says against her neck, his lips brushing, the back of his fingers against her stomach and spreading to encompass her waist. "I haven't left."
But he has. They both have. Months of treating his loft like ground zero for their investigation, looking over their shoulders every time they step outside, the computers and the gear and his contacts and the boys coming over and the all-nighters and she can't remember when they last stopped and loved each other - just because they could.
His fingers tighten on her hips. "Take a bath. I'll find us some dinner."
They don't have time for that. It's just a quick stop to pick up essentials, water her plants, get back to his loft. They have to monitor the-
"Kate, you can-"
"No," she sighs. "I'll shower."
"You don't have to do this."
But she does. "It's faster," she says grimly, turns away from him.
When the water finally heats enough, Kate steps into the shower and stands under it, lets it slide over her skin, wash out everything. The responsibility remains though, clings like a skin that won't molt so she's left scratching at it, digging her nails into raw flesh in the attempt to slough it off.
Maybe they need to take the time to be together, just for an hour. Just be tender and soft and remember why they're doing this, remember the life they'd been creating before they got yanked off a street and were forced to their knees at an abandoned construction site.
She sighs out and opens her eyes, suddenly feels the cool air swirl around her ankles as Castle opens the bathroom door.
She smiles to herself - great minds think alike - and turns to the shower curtain even as he throws it open.
But his face is white, pinched, and panic in every line of his body.
"Castle?" she whispers, reaching for him.
"They - I - there's. . ."
"Castle," she says sharply. "What happened?"
He jumps into the tub with her, crowding her back, her startled reflexes kicking in so that she grabs him even as the shower dumps hot water all over her face. His fingers are bruising her as he clutches.
"I found - bugs. In your apartment. He's bugged your apartment, Kate."
For several long seconds Kate just stares at him, her eyes almost comically large in her beautiful face. Hot water is pounding on his shoulders, stinging his eyes, but Castle barely notices. The undercurrent of banal irritation from earlier has completely evaporated in the heat of his panic.
Panic, and sudden lust as it dawns on him that he is slowly getting soaked to the skin through his clothes, while Kate stands before him, naked and wet. But no, focus.
Suddenly Kate jerks against him, her hand on his belt, pulling him enough off balance that the soles of his shoes slip on the wet shower floor.
"What?" She's on her tiptoes, her lips against his ear, and his hands instinctively move to her waist to steady them both. Her naked, wet waist.
He swallows hard. "Bugs. A listening device. Here. " Castle realizes he's hissing through gritted teeth, like he's afraid someone is going to read his lips. His hair stands up on his arms and neck, because holy shit, what if it's not just audio recording equipment? What if there are cameras?
He looks around frantically, like he's going to find a recording device in the shower head. Ridiculous, but it's Bracken. If the psycho senator was going to employ video surveillance in Kate's apartment, it would totally be in the shower, the fucker.
Kate's fingers tighten at his waistband, and somehow he can feel the heat of her hand even through his wet clothes. "Where is it?"
"I didn't bring it with –"
Kate shakes her head impatiently, her wet hair sliding long his throat. "No, where did you find it?"
"Oh." Castle moves to push the water out his eyes, his fingers grazing the side of her breast, the contact sending a thrill up his arm that somehow ends up as ache in the pit of his stomach. God, it's been so damn long, and she's wet and naked and shit, the bug, and he seriously hates Bracken more than like, Hitler.
His initial panic rushes back, and chokes a little on the words. "Kate. It was under your bed."
Kate drops down to her heels with a thump, and he can feel the sudden expansion of her ribs as she gasps. Her hand flutters to her mouth, her pupils huge. "Okay. Okay. We can't freak out." With her other hand she's still clutching his belt so tightly her knuckles are turning white, and Castle can feel his panic settling into the familiar rage - that she has to live like this.
"Do you think he knows?" she whispers, even though there are two doors and pounding water between them and the bug. "What if he's seen us, figured out what we're doing?"
"It doesn't matter if he knows. We can't stop now, we – " Castle stops and tries to breathe, to think. "No, Bracken doesn't know. If he did he wouldn't wait, we'd be dead in some warehouse by now." Kate flinches, a sharp shiver he feels along the length of his body, and damn it, they are not going to let this get to them. "It's just a coincidence, Kate. He doesn't know anything, that's why he set the bugs. He's got nothing."
Kate's shaking her head again, her body nestled against his. "This is so dangerous. Not just for us. Alexis, your mom… maybe we should cool it for a while, we should – "
"No. Kate." Castle wraps his arms around her and tries to ignore the burning arousal in his gut. "It's dangerous no matter what. We have to finish this, together. And hey," Castle waggles his eyebrows at her, desperate to banish that hollow look behind her eyes, " I guess this means you just have to stay at the loft indefinitely. With me."
Kate's shoulders drop but her eyebrows remain knotted. "Wait. If you don't think Bracken knows we're investigating him, why were you looking for bugs?"
Castle slips his hand along her neck, pushing back her hair. "I wasn't looking, I just found it."
"Under my bed? What were you looking for under my bed?"
"My underwear."
Kate leans back, a laugh startled out of her. "Your what?"
"My underwear. The black silk boxers I got in Italy. I haven't seen them in a month. They're so soft and... listen, it's not important why." Castle's abruptly aware that he doesn't sound his manliest. "The important thing is there was a bug. Under your bed. Which I found. I saved us."
"You know." Kate's chewing on her lip, drops of water slipping along her mouth. "We don't know it was Bracken."
"Kate. It's a recording device. Under your bed. We absolutely know it was Bracken."
"God." Kate leans forward and rests her forehead on his chest. "He's such a pervert."
And suddenly Castle wants to laugh, despite the fear and hopelessness that's worn them down for the last several months. He wants to laugh because Kate is naked and wet in his arms, and Bracken is just a fucking pervert who has to bug her bedroom to have anything of her at all.
Castle wraps an arm around her waist, content to simply hold her for a moment, but all at once Kate's a flurry of movement, gasping as she slips his leg between hers. She's got half the buttons on his shirt undone before he's even realized she's started.
"Wait. What are you doing?"
Now Kate's pulling his half unbuttoned shirt over his head, the wet sleeves sticking to his arms and ohhh. Yes.
"What do you think we're doing? We're in the shower together." She throws his shirt over the edge and starts on his belt. "You're way overdressed."
Kate smiles at him through her wet lashes and pops the button on his pants. She starts to tug on his zipper but pauses, her fingers so close that he can't himself from canting into her hand.
"Hey." Her lips are twitching a little, her thumb swirling in a slow circle. "Did you find them?"
Castle blinks hard to get the water out of his eyes. Kate's hand is stroking right at the junction of his thigh and his brain is about two seconds from fritzing out completely.
"What?"
"Your special underpants. Were they under the bed?"
"Silk imported boxers, Kate. Could you not call them underpants? That's not very sexy. And no, they weren't there."
"They weren't?" Kate fixes him with a look of mock disapproval but he can tell she's trying not to laugh. "Where exactly did you leave them, then? Should I be concerned?"
"You're hilarious," Castle mutters into her neck, his lips trailing along the soft skin under her jaw. "Bracken probably took them. For DNA samples, or for evidence in some sort of set-up. Remember this when he tries to woo you into his arms after he makes it look like I'm having an affair, leaving my incredibly expensive and comfortable boxers all over town."
Kate pulls back and cocks an eyebrow at him while she resumes work on his zipper. "When that happens I will totally remember not to go clinically insane, which is the only way I could be 'wooed' by Bracken." Kate shoves his pants off his hips, pulls them down his calves with her toes, her evil smile back. "But what if we're wrong and he's actually fixated on you?"
Castle kicks his pants to the corner, reaches for her hip. "I really don't think that's it."
"We don't know." Kate leans lightly against him, barely touching, driving him crazy. "Bracken's probably keeping your boxers under his pillow. He strokes them to soothe himself to sleep."
"Oh my God. Gross. Why would you say that? Why?" Castle makes a gagging noise, but something hard in the center of his chest loosens at the humor, at making Bracken ridiculous. He pulls his hands back. "I don't know if I can even do this now, that's so gross."
"I'll bet you can." Kate slips her hands into his ordinary cotton boxers, and his eyes flutter shut as he instinctively reaches for her hips and pulls her flush against him.
"I guess we can do it in the shower." Castle's striving for light and offhand, but her wet body and clever hands have left him breathless. "If you really want to."
"I do," Kate murmurs. "I really, really want to. And it's not like we can use the bed."
"Good point," Castle answers, and his last coherent thought before he lifts Kate by the back of her thighs and presses her against the wet tile is the fierce satisfaction that they haven't let Bracken ruin this.
The Senator from New York doesn't realize how much he has come to depend on the bugs until they go quiet.
He lets it go for a week before he brings it up. A week in which he distracts himself with increasingly expensive whiskey and late-afternoon phone calls to push his revamped environmental bill, a week in which he drinks three times as much coffee and sleeps in restless twenty-minute spurts, a week in which he almost considers calling Salina no less than four times. The last time he tries and fails to get anything useful off the recordings, he forces himself to wait the three hours until the sky is shot through with light, until he can call Caviato in without it being immediately apparent what he was thinking about at four in the morning.
The man stands in the doorway of the sleek office with a too-knowing look on his face. Bracken should really switch him out – arrange for him to get into a convenient accident, or, he supposes, funnel through a deep enough payoff to have him satisfied somewhere far enough to be out of the way but close enough that he is on-hand should he be necessary.
But Bracken's become dependent. That's what angers him the most. The dependency on Caviato, on the bugs, on his connection to that damn detective that he can too often feel hovering at the edges of his awareness.
"Feed's good," Caviato says. "I had my guys triple check it. I can put a tail on her if you want confirmation, but my guess is she's been at the writer's."
Bracken waves his hand in an absent dismissal, then changes his mind. "Maybe for a day."
"Done," Caviato says. He hasn't questioned anything, not since the day he implied Bracken's frequent sightings were nothing more than coincidences. But it was Caviato who planted the listening device under the bed in her apartment, and that knowledge lurks in the back of the man's eyes.
"You think –" Bracken starts before violently slamming his mouth shut. He does not ask his subordinates questions, and he absolutely does not ask them questions about their thoughts.
"Feed would be down if she'd found it," Caviato says easily.
"Just want to make sure we don't let it slide under the radar," Bracken replies. "What's today look like? Can we push the meeting with Melba to just before my flight back to DC?"
Caviato responds with a complex chain of resulting reactions to that schedule change, and Bracken follows halfheartedly, the list of obligations endless and frustrating.
Always at the edges of his consciousness is the thought of the recordings. The soft, husky rasp of her words when she wakes in the morning. The commanding snap of her name when she answers the phone in the dead of night. The split second of silence that comes after their quiet whispers and the shuffle of her sheets and their pants of air and just before her voice suddenly breaks over the a of her writer's name.
"Anything else?" Caviato asks, wrapping up, and if he can tell that Bracken's been completely unfocused throughout the conversation he doesn't let on.
Bracken resists the urge to rub his hand along his forehead. "No." He pauses, a sense of purpose and desire crackling just beneath his skin, the same feeling he gets just before stepping up to a podium for a speech that he knows will make the room thunder with applause. "But soon."