Chapter 10: Wasted and wounded
Castle spends the hour or so that's now all that's left of the afternoon considering his options and hoping that a body drops so that he has a semi-credible excuse for turning up at Beckett's apartment to ask questions. Then he realises that actually he doesn't want a body to drop, because then he'll be following her round and won't need to go to her apartment to ask questions, so he flips his mind-set by one-eighty degrees and starts considering the possible benefits of wine and/or cake.
He knows Beckett drinks wine. He doesn't know if she likes cake, though in his rather extensive experience cake or chocolate (or chocolate cake) tends to go down well with upset women. It works perfectly on his mother and daughter. Now he comes to think of it, he's not entirely sure what Beckett actually eats. He assumes she must do, but he can't actually say that he's noticed. (He never knew what she liked, or didn't like. He doesn't now.) He is not stupid enough to think that flowers are a good idea.
In the end he takes both wine, a good and unusual white Burgundy, and some rather over-decorated cupcakes from a newly fashionable bakery; and hopes that neither will end up over his head as he is allowed to enter by the doorman. (He still does not at all understand how Beckett can afford an apartment this expensive, including a doorman, on a cop's salary.) However, the doorman turns out to be a fan of Derrick Storm, and upon Castle signing the front of the book that is dragged out from his doorman's lair is very happy to let Mr Castle go up and see Miss Beckett. (Miss? And the doorman is still alive?)
Just as he's about to tap on the door he becomes aware of conversation within. He has a sudden doubt. What if Beckett has a (well-hidden) boyfriend? He eavesdrops shamelessly for a minute, but can't make out the words. What he can make out is the cadence and breaks of a phone call. He relaxes. It might have been a little difficult to pursue his aims with a boyfriend on the scene, though he can't imagine any boyfriend putting up with or surviving Beckett's work ethic. (He forgets that he always had. Then, he'd worked hard too.)
He raps smartly on the door, wine visible in front of him. With only a little luck… and indeed it is his lucky day. Beckett opens the door without necessarily having looked to see who's outside it, and he walks confidently in before she can object.
Oh.
Oh.
That's why she didn't bother looking. Her hand is on her gun and the safety on the holster is unsnapped. It is quite unbelievably hot. She is unbelievably hot. He shuts the door behind him. Her face relaxes marginally – ah. That's not relaxation. That's deciding that he's no threat and not particularly interesting. How… unflattering – and she resnaps the holster.
And then she turns away from him, picks her phone back up, and restarts the conversation, waving him to a seat some distance away. He's more than a little insulted. He doesn't sit down. He takes the wine and cakes to her kitchenette and without a by-your-leave opens the fridge and puts the wine in to cool down. The fridge is almost entirely empty. There's a pizza box, with a single slice missing when he peeks, some green stuff that might have been salad a week ago, and the wine he's just put there. That's it. He looks around the apartment. It's beautifully decorated: classic clean pale wooden furniture, pale cream walls, accent cushions on the darker cream couch and chair, paintings on the walls: no photographs in this room. Pale birch wood bookshelves, full of tidy rows of books. It's light, airy and tasteful: perfectly neat. It has as much personality and life as a glass of distilled water. If Beckett wasn't actually in it, he'd swear it was unoccupied. Maybe except for the books – at least they look as if they've been read.
"Dad, did you eat dinner?" Beckett has no right, on the basis of the contents of her fridge, to ask anyone that question.
"What was it?" Castle's brain catches up, suddenly. Dad. Ah. She's talking to her father. Who he'd thought might be spending time in White Plains, given Beckett's recent strain. Obviously not. Day attendance? Not attending any more? Why on earth is she nagging her father about dinner?
"Okay. Do you want me to bring you over anything?"
"Okay. I'll call you tomorrow. See you Saturday." Beckett calls her father every night? Even Alexis doesn't call him, or vice versa, every night when he's touring, and she's a child. Or he is. (He calls Alexis every other night.)
The phone clicks off.
"Why are you here, Castle?" She doesn't sound irritated, or upset, or angry, or concerned – or interested. Her mind is clearly elsewhere. It's a very peculiar feeling. He's never ignored. He's never not the centre of attention. Beckett, however, really isn't paying him much attention at all. He considers attracting her full attention in an unignorable way. Then he considers that her gun is still on her hip. Then he considers how much he's fucked up already by trying that route to getting Beckett's attention. Amazing. Sensible thought and not instinctive reaction. He discounts the idea of kissing her. For the moment.
"I needed to ask some more questions. I brought some wine, as a down payment on the answers."
"Couldn't it have waited till tomorrow?" She sounds rather tired, as if talking to him is too much effort for this evening. She'd sounded like that in the cab on Friday night. She'd sounded like that in the precinct, under the brisk sharp tones.
"No. I need the answers before I can write any more." He smiles evilly. "You wouldn't want me to lack inspiration, would you?" She looks extremely sceptical. "I'd have to be around the precinct even more if I did."
"If it's like that, then, get on and ask. You're ubiquitous as it is. If you showed up any more often you'd be on first-name terms with the cockroaches. They're ubiquitous too."
"Ubiquitous. That's such a great word. It slithers over the tongue." He ignores the comment about the cockroaches, on the grounds that at least there's a glimmer of expression in her voice now, rather than the complete disinterest when he'd bounced in. "Have you got glasses and a corkscrew?"
"Bribing a cop is a felony, Castle."
"I'm not bribing you."
"Oh?" She raises a delicate eyebrow. It's astonishingly sexy. "You've brought an expensive" –
"How do you know that?" – she looks at him as if he's a complete idiot –
"bottle of wine in the hope of enticing answers out of me." With astounding control, Castle doesn't mention what else he'd like to entice out of Beckett. Or into Beckett, to be precise. Civility, Rick. Pouncing on her is not going to work. Probably.
"If you don't want wine then I brought cupcakes." Both eyebrows rise this time.
"You must really want those answers." I do. But not the answers you're thinking I want.
"Do you want any of my wine?" She shrugs.
"Why not? It'll be some compensation for having to answer yet more questions."
He turns back to the kitchenette.
"Where are you going?"
"I put the wine in the fridge."
"Fine. Glasses in the cupboard on the right. Corkscrew in the drawer." She's sat down on the couch, feet tucked up, in a way that screams unthinking habit. If she'd been thinking, she might not have done that, but it's clear from the renewed heaviness in her voice and posture that, brief flash of earlier snark notwithstanding, she's too tired to think, too. If she's so tired that she doesn't even seem to care that he's showed up, invaded her kitchen, and she's letting him do as he chooses – this had better be run on a very different line than he had originally been contemplating.
While he's opening the wine, which fortunately he had mostly cooled before he came here, and finding her wine glasses, he contemplates the position, and the problem. He doesn't want to be some sort of work colleague that she's pals with but doesn't really care about. In addition, he doesn't want to be some one night stand, however that might blaze. With some disbelief, he realises that he wants to be – more than friends, be who they were, be who they could be again. Once upon a time, long ago and far away, he'd loved her; and he thinks that she had loved him. If he wants that back, though, he's going to have to work for it, because right now something is occupying her mind to the exclusion of everything else, and that is not a happy thought that she is thinking.
He carefully brings both wineglasses and the opened bottle to the low table in front of the couch, and returns to find the cupcakes, plates, a knife and some forks. When he brings them over, sets them out and pours both of them wine, Beckett manages a half-smile of automatic, absent thanks but refuses more than a third of a glass and a small piece of one cupcake. Mice eat and drink more than that.
"Did you already eat dinner?"
"Yeah." Well, she'd eaten what she wanted to. She's not that hungry at the moment, worry about her father shrinking her gut. She eats because she has to, but beyond the amounts that are necessary it's dry in her mouth: too much effort on something that isn't presently important.
Castle sits down beside her. She notes with mildly content disinterest that he's left a civil distance between them, and assumes that his reasons for popping by are entirely work related. It's a bit weird that he's brought the modern equivalent of cakes and ale, but it's likely just a manifestation of good manners. She's certainly not in the mood for celebration. She swallows a morsel of the cake, and a sip of the wine.
"What do you want to know?"
"Tell me about how you get to be a detective, and how cops get promoted." She can do that. In terse bare prose appropriate to the factual subject, she runs through the main strands.
"Would you want to be a Lieutenant, or a Captain?"
"No." That reaction is wholly automatic and definite.
"Why not?" He'd have thought that she would have the same flaring ambition; that she would want to be a visible, imitable, success. (She'd wanted to be the first female Chief Justice.)
"Desk work. Politics. Brown-nosing and ass-kissing." She recognises the bitterness in her own voice. "Management." She, despite her efforts to lighten up, makes that sound like it's worse than torture. "Having to decide which case gets resources." Stop talking, Kate. But she doesn't. "Writing off cases as cold." She curls her feet more tightly under herself and, by main force, doesn't say anything more, instead taking another sip of wine which barely dampens her lips.
"Is that what happened?" Castle says, before he can prevent himself. He expects to be evicted almost before the question has left his larynx.
"Yeah," Beckett says flatly. He knows it all, anyway: guessed most, and she'd directed him to the cemetery, so what matter if she reveals that? His character can have a backstory if he so pleases, and she's too busy to care. When his arm moves she thinks he's reaching for his cake, or wine. Instead he reaches for her hand. Confidently, as if she won't refuse him; and the memory of the first time he'd ever done that surges up about her.
This is not that time. She's not that shy fourteen year old, and she's had occasional lovers since, almost been married once. Physical – sexual – connection doesn't scare her. The fire running up her arm, though, does. It's the same feeling as when she first reached for him: the one that had changed everything and set her preferences in men and… and led her straight to her first broken heart and the first foundations of the walls that she built full height after that ghastly January evening and which have served her so very well ever since. Her hand lies lax, unresisting and unresponsive, under his, unmoving in the shock of the long-forgotten sensation. Castle, having paused for a beat, clearly thinks that this is acceptance, and takes the opportunity to slide a fraction closer – still separate – and to clasp her hand more closely, unconsciously – she hopes it's unconsciously – slipping his thumb over the heel of her palm, the fine transparent skin of her wrist.
"What else is wrong? You've been a little off your game since Friday." Her hand flexes under his, small indication that he's hit a nerve.
"Not your problem, Castle." No, but he wants her to be his problem, and he had begun in protecting her from her troubles. (It had been easy, then.) She's troubled now, and since under his external, PR-induced, public shell he has a mile-wide streak of protectiveness (maybe it's being a parent, maybe it's always been there) and, of course, a mile-wide streak of wanting Beckett back, he wants to help. Help is laced with a rather hefty core of feeling that it wouldn't take very much for hand-holding to turn into hugging.
"I'm a good listener." He's good at other things, too. Comforting hand-holding and protective hugs are two of them. Other forms of physical consolation are available on request.
"You never stop talking, Castle. How do you ever listen?" but there's no real bite in it. "It's not your concern."
"No, but I can listen if you want to talk. Safe ears. I'm not involved. Sometimes it's good just to talk to someone who's got no skin in the game." He's not exactly telling the truth, but he isn't lying either. Right now, he has no skin in this game, and he's not in any way involved. But he wants to be.
There's a long pause, during which Beckett, or even her hand under his, does not move at all.
"My dad is dying," she says harshly. It lies out there on the table, lead-heavy. There's another pause. "Now I've said it. Maybe he's not dying yet. They'll tell me in a couple of days. But if he isn't dying this time he will be next time. There will be a next time. There always is a next time, no matter how much he promises there won't be. He can't stay away from it. Every time he comes back from it a little older, a little more ill, a little more dead behind the eyes."
She's turned away from him, talking to the pale impersonal décor, the words spilling out as if they aren't hers at all. "He doesn't eat unless I remind him. He has to eat properly, but he doesn't." If the subject weren't so very serious, Castle might have thought Pot, meet Kettle. "If it weren't for the remains of the insurance he'd have had to sell his apartment to pay for the treatment. Maybe this time he will need to. I don't know. I don't know what it will cost him, or what his finances are. He won't discuss it. He could live here, in between treatments. If there is a treatment. I don't know yet. He might be too far gone. Maybe a transplant would work, but there's no point if he can't stop drinking." She pulls her hand away, moves to the window and stares out blindly into the twilight.
"I'm Kate Beckett, and my dad's an alcoholic," she says into the gathering night. There's no hope in her dead, drifting words, and Castle, whose attention to small clues of voice and intonation has been sharpened by eleven years of parenthood, is moving almost before she's finished the final word, spinning her into him and holding her without any thought other than comfort; arms enclosing her and her head tucked into his shoulder.
It takes him a moment to realise that she's not crying. He'd expected crying, simply from experience and tone. She's just said out loud that her father is dying of alcohol abuse and she's not crying. Nor, he becomes aware, is she leaning on him. Her lean body is strung taut, no hint that she might need support. (She'd never asked for support.) The only reason that she's close in against him is that he pulled her there, an instinctive reaction to her pain.
She doesn't need him. Perhaps she never had needed him. But no-one can go through this alone – can they? And she might not need him but she hasn't pushed him away. He pats her consolingly on the back and drops his arms – and just for a short moment she moves closer as if there's something that she can take from him.
And then she steps away.
"Thank you," she says neutrally. "Sorry you had to put up with that." Her drawbridge is up, the portcullis down, the keep of her self-control reinforced, the half-instant of almost-need gone as if it had never existed.
"No problem. I said I'd listen." He waggles his ears, and raises a slightly surprised quirk of smile.
"You can waggle your ears?"
"Yep. Cute trick." He waits half a beat. "But don't think you know me." The smile opens a little further. That worked. He goes back to the couch and sits down, nibbling on his cake. He picks up the wine, then, remembering her words and slightly ashamed of himself for even suggesting it, puts it down again.
"It's okay, Castle. You can pour some more wine." He must have shown some surprise, though he truly doesn't remember it. "What? I am not my father." No. You certainly are not.
He pours, and somewhat to his surprise Beckett returns to sit in her corner of the couch, takes a few sips and eats a few tiny bites of cupcake. She's almost made it to eating as much as a whole nuclear family of mice. He takes her hand again, as if he has a right to do so, as if there's no doubt that she'll allow it. (It had worked before, eventually.) She doesn't argue, and after a small surprised space she turns her hand over in the way she always had. He can still feel the tense misery of a moment ago in the shape of her fingers, but when he looks at her face there are still no tears. Her control is terrifying. (Her control had been terrifying for the week before she tore him apart and shut the door in his face.)
There's no talking. Beckett's hand stays under his, but doesn't in any way at all request or imply the possibility for more, and even Castle's normal chutzpah is defeated by the depth of her other issues. On the other hand, the silence is supportive not argumentative, and when the wine is done, still in this strangely reassuring quiet, and Castle stands to go, he feels he's made some progress.
So he doesn't try to resist his impulse to hug her again, before he opens the door, nor the swiftly following desire to peck her on the cheek, both of which would have been perfectly sensibly bearable.
It's the kiss after that that was a mistake.
Thank you to all readers, reviewers and those who have followed and favourited.
I am suffering with some evil bug. If I have missed anyone who has reviewed today/last night, I'm sorry.