It's not until the next Saturday that Rick makes it to the Haunt again.
Having to rewrite almost his entire book to be able to comfortably turn it into the first of a series is proving to be a chore, but an easy challenge. He's having a bit of trouble with the chapters post-climax, the falling actions. In order for the story to work, to capture the reader he has to employ a bit of his own use of negative capability. The problem is he has to set it in a graveyard. He's never been to a graveyard before. He's dreading having to polish up that part the way he wants it.
He's glad that at the very least, him and Kate are on a ground of equal footing. A part of him thinks he put a curse on himself, accepting her friendship and settling for that and only that. Getting to be around her, see her smile, hear her laugh, watch her grow, watch her live, have to sit idly by when she does meet someone. Unlike him, who only spends his free time in a bar, she works in one. And this is New York. Someone better than him is sure to come along a lot sooner than any later.
Kate gave him a small smile when she saw him come in with his shoulder bag slung around his neck, brought him his usual drink of a double scotch rocks which he decided to nurse as he worked on a few chapters. Gina told him the book isn't due to print until at least mid-summer at the very earliest, so he has time to get it right, but he's decided to be honest with himself and admit that his intentions for venturing out to the Old Haunt to do some of his writing is nothing more than a cover at this point.
It's another quiet night at the Haunt and Mick is off duty, with Tony down in his office doing the paperwork for the tax season. Kate is working the bar with the occasional trip out from behind it to tend to the few patrons still lingering. Rick is at the point in his work where he could either stop and be satisfied, or start something else and be dissatisfied that he fizzled out and didn't finish. Deciding it's best for the former, he saves his work and closes his laptop, downing the last of the melted ice in the bottom of his glass.
Stuffing his laptop in his bag he scoots himself out of his booth, taking his glass with him as he walks up to the far end of the bar, where Kate has a wet rag in her hand, running it back and forth against the counter.
She looks over to him, having missed him for most of the night. She can't tell if he's purposefully keeping his distance ever since their talk at the coffee shop earlier in the week, or if he's just behind in his writing. She doesn't feel allowed to miss him. She doesn't feel allowed to cling to anything that makes things easier for her. And as much as it complicates things, in the moment, that's what he does for her. He just makes things easier for her. He takes it all away.
Nonetheless, she feels her breath tingle as she draws it in when she sees him approach her with his empty glass dangling from his right hand and a soft, content smirk on his face. "Need a refill?" She asks him, reaching underneath the bar to grab the bottle of scotch.
Rick smirks over to her as he sets his glass down onto the counter and takes a seat in the stool in front of her. "If you can squeeze me into your busy schedule." He pokes fun at the absence of customers. Kate chuckles in her throat as she grabs his glass and pours him a double shot of scotch.
"Yeah, real busy." She says with widening eyes and an obvious tone as she finishes pouring his drink.
"You guys don't get that much foot traffic?" Rick asks, honestly curious as he picks up his glass from the counter. "This place was pretty popular when I starting coming here."
Kate shrugs and picks the rag back up. "We're pretty busy at happy hour, so I do fine."
Rick takes the first small sip of his drink, taking his cue that she's open for conversation. He enjoys talking to her, while he still can. "Save for the guys who sit in the corner all night waiting for their opportunity to come and hit on you."
Kate, knowing what he's saying, looks around the bar, leaning over the counter and checking the other booths. "Who's that?"
Rick smirks at her widely while narrowing his eyes at her. "Come on, we've established that you're not interested. I think we can manage speaking a bit more candidly about it, can't we?"
Kate turns around with a soft smile, tossing the rag back onto the hook underneath the counter where it belongs. "You said you weren't hitting on me, Rick."
Rick sets his glass back down to the counter with a thud and traces the rim with his index finger. "Well, I wasn't." Rick corrects himself. "But that doesn't mean I haven't been lying in wait for my chance to talk to you while all the other guys in this bar do hit on you."
Kate laughs softly as she goes over to the sink and takes the basket of glasses and sets it on the counter behind the bar, starting to stack them underneath for storage. "So, what," she starts on a chuckle, "are you saying you're coming over to talk to me so I don't get hit on?"
"Hey, what else am I suppose to do?" He asks her with a shrug of his shoulders as he lifts his glass up again and takes a small sip. "It's all I can do to bide my time, waiting for someone better than me to waltz in and steal you from me."
His wording makes her heart flutter, but she tries her best to shake it off with another grin. "Steal me from you?"
"Yeah," he says on another shrug.
"So, I'm yours all of a sudden? I thought we were just friends." She says in a sly grin as she continues to store the glasses.
"Well, I guess you're right." He says in a lowered tone, looking down into his glass. "Theft does imply possession of some sort. And if you recall, I've already tried once before a certain person who shall remain nameless decided to cancel at the last minute."
Kate stops stacking the glasses and looks at him with a sullen frown. "You just love reminding me of that, don't you?"
"I didn't bring it up to make you feel guilty or anything."
"Yeah?" She starts, letting frustration get the better of her in her tone, "Then why'd you bring it up at all?"
"I brought it up to say that you're right in that you were never really mine."
"Yeah, and you also said that someone better than you was going to come along and 'steal' me away from you." She says using air quotes. "I told you that I'm not looking for a relationship. That goes for everyone." She says, waving her hand about the bar with a glass. Rick nods, not wanting to rebutt.
"That's alright," he says, his heart a cold rock inside of his chest, "I'm not your type anyway."
Kate leans back up and gives him in an incredulous smirk. "How would you know what my type is, Rick?"
"Well, I know it's not me." He says with a shake of his head as he takes his glass back up in his hand. "Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"Okay, so since you know me so well, why don't you enlighten me then?" She tells him, waving another glass about in the air before putting it underneath the counter. "Just what do you think is... my type, huh?"
Rick shrugs his shoulders, "I don't know," he starts meagerly. "You're probably looking for... someone more serious. Someone more square-shouldered, more by-the-book. Someone who makes his work giving to others. You're probably looking for a guy who... makes a difference in the world. A girl like you, you're probably looking for a guy who's a... a fireman who saves kittens from trees or... or a doctor who saves orphans with cancer or something just as heroic. You're looking for someone that society looks up to and looks at as a hero."
Kate, having stopped her work and is leaning against the counter with her palms, feels her heart painfully clench inside of her chest. What he said sounds just about perfect for her, and if said by anyone else, she'd feel that he's right. But she knows what her mother would say. She can hear her now, the know-it-all inflection of her mother's voice saying 'if all that's true, Katie, just where do you fit in'?
"Sound pretty nice." She says in a small, heavy voice as she looks away and picks up another glass from the basket.
Rick nods, hating himself for being right and drowns himself in the rest of his drink before slowly setting it back down to the counter. "So, like I said." He starts in a hoarse voice. "It's all I can do to bide my time while you wait for that doctor who saves babies to come and sweep you off your feet to... go make your difference in the world."
Kate smirks to herself. "You saying you don't make some sort of difference, Rick? You're a world-famous novelist." She says obviously.
"Please," Rick waves at her before folding his arms against the bar, "the only time any of my books makes a difference in the world is when some scientist at NASA uses one of them to even out the legs on his chalkboard."
Kate raises her brow as she stops organizing the glasses and takes the bottle of scotch back in her hands. "I've got to say, Rick." She says as she pours him another small shot. "This whole self-deprecation thing is not only pretty depressing, it's also kind of unattractive."
Rick chuckles darkly as he watches her slide his glass back over to him. "I could act more confident and lie to you if you wanted. But I figured you were too smart for that, so I decided to just be a little bit more real."
"There's a difference between being real and trying to make me feel sorry for you, Rick." She says as she stores the scotch back, noticing he's taking his time taking the first drink of his next glass.
"You already said I didn't have a shot." He tells her, lifting her glass up to his lips and looks down into the liquid. "If I wanted to get you to pity me," he says just before he takes another drink, "I would have told you about my childhood spent wandering around the library. But I chose to play that card a little closer to the vest."
"I thought we established that my turning you down had nothing to do with you." She replies and takes the empty basket in one hand. Rick waits until she returns from the other side of the bar after returning the empty basket to continue. "I mean," she starts again with a meager shrug, "you're a good guy. And I had fun at that magic show you took me to. And you're well-meaning, you just... don't always know what to do."
Rick chuckles darkly in his chest again as he lifts his glass up to his lips again. "You're gonna get a lot of mileage out of that news article, aren't you?"
"Can you give yourself a break?" She asks him with a smirk and a raised brow. "It's not like it meant anything. It was a one night stand."
After downing the last of his scotch, he lets the glass slam back down to the counter, looking back over to her with a dark, lidded gaze. "You know, if I had a lot more heartbreak and just a bit more responsibility I wanted to run away from, I just might believe you."
Kate feels herself stop for a moment, looking over to him with a surprising shock in her expression. "What do you mean?"
"There's one thing and one thing only that separates us from animals, Kate, and that's our ability to ask one simple question." He tells her while lifting his index finger to her. "Why."
Kate knits her brow at him. "Why?"
Rick nods and hums his assertion. "Mhm, and if we as humans, the forms of higher cognitive thinking that we are, resort to doing something like sex without asking why, well..." he trails off and looks down into his empty glass, "in my opinion, we might as well set ourselves back a few million years in the evolutionary chain."
Kate feels a veil of seriousness fall over the two of them, getting into territory neither of them realized they were treading. She can sense him falling, sinking closer and closer toward the rim of his empty glass, his eyes getting heavier.
"We're supposed to be better than that." He says under his breath.
She wants to reach out to him, do something simple like put a soft hand on his forearm, take his hand, but she cowards out and decides instead to just make noise to fill the dead air by rearranging the glasses she had just stacked underneath the counter. "We all do things we can't stand, Rick." She says while looking anywhere but his soulful eyes. "And as my mother might say, it's those things that shape us into the people we end up becoming. Whether good or bad, they make us into who we are. It's just up to you to decide which way to go."
Rick lets out a breath, feeling himself relax. "She sounds like a wise woman, your mother."
Not correcting him, all she does is look back up to him, give him a soft, all too heavy smile, and nods, feeling her grief rear it's terrifying head in the pits of her minds again. "And I never said that I wouldn't ever be in a place in my life for Mr. Right. I'm just not in that place right now."
Rick nods and looks away from her again. "Well, that's not me anyway. I've always been more of a Mr. two-wrongs than I am a Mr. Right." Kate chuckles and feels a smile brighten her features as she busies herself with something on the counter.
"Despite your fishing for compliments," Kate says softly, looking over to him with a sly, soft smirk, "you're better than you give yourself credit for."
"Well, I think I'm still in the process of figuring out just who it is I really am." He replies, noticing his lips turned up into a small smile.
"When you're done, would you let me know?" She tells him with a small smile of her own as she turns to go to the other end of the bar.
Rick chuckles to himself and slides off his bar stool to follow her. "Trying to influence my findings, are you?"
"I never said that. All I said was when you do manage to figure it out..." she trails off, picking up a fresh bottle of scotch in her hand and turning back around, "let me know."
Rick turns back around to face her as she goes back to the other end of the bar. "I think you might be looking for someone just a tad more perfect than I, Ms. Beckett."
Kate laughs despite herself and rounds the end of the bar, slowly walking toward him with a soft smile. "Does this mean you're content with waiting around for this..." she says, slowly approaching him and crossing her arms, "fireman slash doctor to show up and steal me away from you?" She asks him, tossing his words back at him jokingly.
"Content? No," He says, "but settling for what I can get while it lasts... sure, maybe." He shrugs.
"A world-famous, eight time best selling novelist who's rich and famous," she shrugs back at him, standing now just a foot away from him, "anyone else would say you just might have a shot over that fireman slash doctor."
"Then I guess it's a good thing that both of us know better." He says, shuffling forward again. "Writing is what I love to do, Kate. I just got very lucky in that I can actually manage a very decent living doing it."
"Well, then maybe I wasn't talking that." She says, catching herself as she meets his eyes, pushing back against everything drawing her into him. "And I'm not looking for someone who's perfect, Rick."
Rick gives her a slow nod before craning his neck and looking down to the floor. "Then just for future reference, what exactly are you looking for?"
The person who killed my mother, she says in her head. She bites down on the inside of her lip to keep it inside as she feels her eyes sting and throws it off by looking away and giving him a shrug. "Don't go making any drastic changes on my account, okay?" She says with a smile and starts to turn to head back behind the bar. "I like talking to this version of you."
Rick smiles heavily and feels his stomach flutter nervously as she turns and starts to head back behind the bar. "You know, I hear they sell medical degrees on the internet."
Kate catches his eyes again as she rounds the bar. "Still worried someone might 'steal me away'?" She asks him, using air quotes again.
"Oh, always." He says on a chuckle.
"Dispell the paranoia, okay, Rick? I'm not going to let anyone steal me away from you." She says, mocking a caring voice.
"Because you're not mine to steal away from?" He prods, firing back with her own words
She eyes him again as she leans against the other end of the bar. "Goodnight, Rick." She says, giving him a small nod and a smile.
He smiles in return, giving her a soft smirk of his own. "Goodnight, Kate."
A/N may feel like a bit of a filler chapter, but the next chapter is one that ive planned in from the start, so just hang in there ;) And yes, he is supposed to be like this. It will make sense in the next chapter.