She's just about to remove the wig when he edges up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist.
"Leave it," he says, looking over her shoulder, at their reflections in the mirror.
"Castle, there is no way… none. Not gonna happen. I don't care what kind of X-Files fantasies you have swirling around in that head of yours." She tucks a strand of the overly processed, too-red hair, behind her ear.
"Even now," he breathes into her hair, his voice breathy. "As she pushed an errant strand of titian hair behind her ear, she worried her partner would know instinctively what she could only guess."
He's not. He can't be. Oh… but he is.
There aren't many things that Kate won't admit to. But this might be one. Katherine Beckett is a fan-girl. She's a child of the eighties, a teenager of the nineties. She grew up along with the internet. As Castle was writing his first bestseller, Kate was writing her first (and only) fan-fiction. Writing might not have been her thing, but Sundays spent curled up on the couch were. The last four years of tension between herself and Castle had been almost as excruciating as the epic story of Mulder and Scully. They may not have had to deal with aliens and vast government conspiracies, but their love, their partnership, was no less genuine. Her heart had fluttered as he uttered the overly intellectual, yet equally arousing, words.
She knows this monologue by heart.
"To be thought of as simply a beautiful woman was bridling, unthinkable." He traces his hand down her jaw, thumbs her lip and brushes the hair away from her neck; he places kisses along the smooth expanse of skin that he has exposed.
Oh god. This feels so wrong. He bites on her shoulder. So, very, right.
"But she was beautiful..." he murmurs into her collarbone, catching her eye in the mirror. He winks and she drops her gaze. The man is too much.
He continues. "Fatally, stunningly prepossessing." He stills, lifts her chin to make eye contact in the mirror. He pulls off the hairpiece and runs his hands through her hair, gently pulling out the tangles. "Yet the compensatory respect she commanded only deepened the yearnings of her heart... to let it open, to let someone in."
He turns her in his arms then, lets his tongue touch and play at her lips. She opens her mouth to him, eager for his taste. She pulls at his tie and unknots it slowly, with trembling fingers, lets it float to the floor. "Kate," he hums into her mouth. It lets her know that while this may be a fantasy of his, she is still the center of his attentions.
She decides to play along. This is going to rock his world.
"All morning the stranger's unsolicited compliments had played on the dampened strings of her instrument," she grins and his eyes widen into large circles of surprise; lust and adoration.
"Until the middle "C" of consciousness was struck, square and resonant." She pops the buttons on his white cotton shirt and runs her palms down his broad chest, lets her nails run a lazy circle around a nipple. He looks like he's having trouble breathing. She shuffles him toward the bed, and he falls heavily into the mattress as the backs of his knees hit the edge.
"She was flattered," Kate grins. "His words had presented her a pretty picture of herself, quite unlike the practiced mask of uprightness that mirrored back to her from the medical examiners and the investigators and all the lawmen who dared no such utterances."
The long and rambling sentence gives him time to recover. As she reaches down to unbuckle his belt, he grasps her wrists and pulls her down onto the mattress. She lands with a thud on his chest and he lets out an, "oomph" of surprise.
As she's catching her breath, he takes controls and flips her onto her back, covers her with his body. He runs his hands down her sides, nails raking over her ribs and down her torso.
"She felt an involuntary flush," he says, emphasizing flush with a carefully timed brush of his thumb against her crotch. "And rebuked herself for the girlish indulgence."
He torments her with his hands, trailing along her thighs and back up again. Her hips rise to meet him and he smirks with every upsurge. Finally he concentrates on where she wants it most, he pulls and he probes, teases and tweaks; continues his speech in a low and erotic voice.
"But the images came perforce and she lets them play- lets them flood in like savory- or more a sugary confection- from her adolescence, when her senses were new and ungoverned by fear and self-denial."
That these flowery words have such an effect on her might otherwise cause her embarrassment. However, he watches her with such careful veneration, such love and awe; she feels no shame.
"'Ache,' 'pang,' 'prick,' 'twinge'" he says, causing all those sensations and more; with every precise nip and languid swirl of his tongue, as he divests her of her clothing and shucks his own.
They rise and sink into the soft mattress, bodies melding. Sweat, slick and warm, both holds them together and pushes them apart. Hands grasp and release, tongues clash for dominance. She manages to flip him over and regain the upper hand. She's not finished with him yet.
"How ironic, the Victorian vocabulary of behavioral pathology now so perfectly described the palpations of her own desire. The stranger had looked her in the eye and knew her more completely than she knew herself," she quotes solemnly. His eyes darken, he understands. She leans in for a soft kiss, grins against his mouth as it deepens. They both know what comes next.
"She felt wild," Kate hums, as she aligns their bodies and rubs his tip along her slick entrance. "Feral," she purrs, just slightly lowering herself onto him. "Guilty as a criminal," she growls, as she fully skewers herself upon his erection.
She sets a tranquil rhythm, teasing him and enjoying the feeling of his just… being there. Inside of her, under her, the soft touch of his hands on her hips. He is patient and watches her with a relaxed smile on his face, his hips are still and his eyes are gentle but bright in the soft light of the bedroom.
"Had the stranger unleashed in her what was already there?" she says, rocking her hips and leaning forward onto his chest. The angle offers Kate shallow, but more isolated, sensation and she groans as she feels the tension rising to the surface. "Or only helped her discover a landscape that she, by necessity, blinded herself to?" she grunts out, struggling to maintain control.
"What would her partner think of her?" she squeaks into his ear as he finally bucks his hips in response.
He laughs, obviously amused that he has ruined her long and well recited monologue with a single thrust. She pulls up, sits back on his hips and gives him a raised brow, a valid attempt at a scowl. Scully would be proud.
"But if she'd predictably aroused her sly partner's suspicions," he says, reaching between them and smirking as his fingers play where their bodies join. "Special Agent Dana Scully had herself become..." He glances his thumb about her clit, expertly back and forth, in a steady rhythm; the way she has taught him, until she is crying out above him.
"Simply aroused," he chokes out, as his own orgasm overtakes him.
She collapses onto his chest, breathing heavily and thoroughly satisfied. Her limbs feel heavy and limp. She has almost dozed off when he gently slips from inside her and smoothly moves them to a less delicate position on the bed. She groans in protest but is glad for his forethought as her head hits the downy pillow. He pulls a sheet over their cooling bodies, hooks an arm around her waist and pulls her in close.
"G'night Mulder," she whispers, a final word. A smug smile on her lips as she fast drifts into dreams.
"In my book, I'd written that Agent Scully falls in love, but that's obviously impossible." He hushes into her ear.
"Agent Scully is already in love," she mumbles and he buries his head into her neck.
I have no words for this chapter or how it came to be. So I'll let Avi's response be my author notes.
"Avi sits on her bench outside. The gentle breeze accompanying her voice as she reads timidly the words on the document. In any other moment, clarity and prudence would have stopped her from allowing her partner to indulge in this pleasure."
"But she couldn't stop herself, let alone stop her other half from allowing them to create this alternate scenario. It felt wrong, but oh so right.
She had read the first sentence, and imagined that the original bard would have found himself wanting to entertain these words on paper as well. The visuals on screen. The imagery would have played in his head as he allowed himself to let these characters roam free. Unfortunately for him, he could only go as far as what the universe of these characters would allow.
Right now though, through her partners words, there weren't any limitations when it came to let the bard's words to come to play thru someone else's lips. Spoken by characters that profess reverence to him in some way, they have their own lust filled fantasies of what they imagine could had been to be the first ones to feel these words. To let themselves be drawn into the spiral of disguised want and finally honor his wishes in the most rebellious homage."
