A/N: Sorry for the lengthy delay, I've been struggling with this internally because of the nature of the last two chapters and how this chapter wanted to be written. I finally decided to stop fighting with myself and just change the rating so I don't have to worry about things anymore and can just let things unfold as they will.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Watching Kate Beckett, uninhibited in the bed next to him as his fingers slipped inside the waistband of her panties for the first time, her expression seared in his brain. Her mouth was slightly parted, her eyelids at half-mast as if unable to fully open them.
One tentative stroke against her heated flesh and she arched her back, lifting her hips to meet his touch. At her movement he shifted his hands, placing them both on her hips, gently holding her down to the mattress.
"Don't move." His tone had been serious, commanding and his implied threat of stopping if she didn't listen had been enough to still her hips.
He could tell from the sounds escaping her when he was doing something she wanted him to do again and the power of that knowledge was almost more than he could contain. He could feel her shifting beneath him. He knew she wanted more than his slow gentle touch, but that's all he gave her. He could tell she didn't think it was enough, she wanted more, and then he felt the moment when it became enough, more than enough, and he felt her let go
Castle was breathless with the wonder of watching her. He had never seen anything as amazing as what he had just experienced. Now that he was lying beside her afterwards he couldn't fully wrap his mind around what he had just been privileged enough to witness, much less participate in.
She seemed frozen in place, head still thrown back, eye squeezed shut. The way she had panted his name as she fell over the edge had nearly sent him over with her, though he had reserved himself to just touching her, the most gentle of touches, soft caresses that had driven her insane. She had been true to her word and kept her hands to herself, though he had watched her struggle with it.
She didn't seem thrilled with being the center of attention without being able to give as good as she got, but he knew she would keep her word. Kate Beckett did not make promises lightly. He had savored the experience. It had been an amazing change of pace to have her hand herself over to him in such a trusting manner. Mind boggling, and that didn't have anything to do with the feeling of her skin under his touch or how hot and wet and ready she had been if they had taken things further.
To avoid that problem exactly, he had explored her without reciprocation and didn't let either of them remove any more clothing, not that she had been wearing much by the time he joined her. Despite his desire to see her, all of her, he had restrained himself.
He slipped the tip of his fingers into his mouth, that single digit that had just driven her crazy, tasting her on himself as he waited for her breathing to come back down. She was completely flushed and he was nearly exhausted watching her come apart under his touched.
When her eyes finally opened again, the look on her face made it clear that she was planning to reciprocate the pleasure he had lavished on her. As she reached for him, he knew it was time to make a hasty retreat. He managed to move away just before her hand touched his skin. Even now, after her release, perhaps even more so now than before, her touch was dangerous.
He couldn't risk losing himself in it, in her; he couldn't risk seeing hurt in her eyes or pain knitting her brow because he couldn't control himself. For the first time in his life he wanted to walk away from something wonderful where normally he'd want to embrace and bury himself in it. The risk was too great and as much as it hurt to walk away, he still managed to push himself up and away from the bed.
His legs felt slightly unsteady, as if he were the one who had just had an earth shattering release. In some ways he had. Tension, worry, stress, every negative feeling that had been coursing through him for days flew away as she came apart under his fingers. He had been there with her through every breath, every moan, every cry of 'Castle!' in a tone that he was worried he would hear in his head whenever she called him by that name. The thought of her tone morphing in his head would prove distracting and highly inappropriate at a crime scene if the affect was as painfully obvious as it was now.
She was looking at him with a raised eyebrow and the hint of a frown starting. He didn't want the image of her blissfully content to be replaced with the confusion and possibly disappointment he saw starting to sweep her features.
"I'm going to hop in the shower, dinner will be ready soon." He didn't care that his voice was tight or that he was throbbing with an intensity that physically hurt to ignore. Somehow he made it away from her and into the shower, the water striking him like pins of ice as he leaned his forehead against the shower tiles and tried to breathe.
His breath caught when he heard the bathroom door open followed by Kate's voice calling to him. "I'm going to need some help changing my bandages." She told him, her voice level not indicating that she was mad or upset at all, oddly recovered from her prior state of relaxed breathlessness.
"I'll be out in five minutes." He told her, not lifting his head from the tile and looking down his body, willing the cold shower to do what it was supposed to, but her voice had brought it all right back and he thought about amending that with ten minutes or just turning the water warm and taking care of it the normal way. Somehow, though, now that his hands had been on her, it felt like a weird form of cheating to use them on himself.
He was so lost in his internal debate that he didn't realize the water had gotten warm until it began to feel a little too hot against his chilled skin. He started to turn around, but a firm hand on his shoulder stopped him in place.
"You're not moving a muscle until you tell me what the hell is going on." Her tone was firm and he suddenly felt like he was in the interrogation room, across the table from her.
Castle fought the impulse to lie or brush her off, feed her some kind of story so that he could get her out of there and try to work through this on his own. He knew from her tone, though, that she had the same intensity as when they had a murderer on the line and she was going to keep pushing until she got the answer to what seemed to be the most important question in her life: Why?
"I just," he took a long breath and exhaled heavily before he continued, "I just can't do this right now."
He almost bolted from the shower, probably would have if she weren't between him and the door, when her hand started to move off his shoulder. She trailed her fingers lightly down his back; the water made the touch smooth and sent a shiver through him. Her hand started back up, joined by the other and then they both snaked around to lie against his stomach as she leaned in to hug him from behind. He felt her rest her head against the back of his shoulder and tried to focus on that instead of the rest of her skin touching his from behind.
"Why?" she asked quietly.
Oh, she was good. She'd get a confession out of him yet. Torture was obviously on the table as an option as her fingers started to move in a little circular pattern against the skin on his stomach.
He started to move away and her hands were suddenly on either side, holding him in place by his hips as she took a step back from him. "Hands on the wall."
He responded to the commanding tone without a second thought and then registered how much it felt like she was about to arrest him from this position and he couldn't help laughing, and she laughed with him for a moment, letting her head come back to rest against his back between his shoulder blades.
"Can we just have this conversation once I'm out of the shower?" He asked after the laughter died away. Castle was trying his best to rein himself in, but he was unable to keep his frustration from seeping into his response.
"After what you just did, you still think you can't control yourself?" her tone was soothing, but he heard the notes of humor and then he wasn't sure if she was speaking anymore because one of her hands has migrated around from his hip to rest just below his navel, dangerously close to contact they shouldn't be making right now.
"It's not worth the risk." He spoke quietly into the wall.
Beckett shifted again, lifting her head and her lips came to rest on his neck, kissing and licking along to trails of water running over them. "You think you might hurt me, but you're not capable."
Her words barely filtered through, but they impacted and he felt himself relaxing under her confidence in him. "Kate." He said on a heavy breath as her teeth grazed along his neck, her breath almost cold in the steam filling the shower.
"Don't move." She told him, her other hand sliding along his hip, lazily up then back down. It didn't slip his notice that she had chosen the exact words he had spoken to her earlier. As she had relinquished her control to him, he felt the last of his slip away.
With a groan, he let his head rest against the wall as he looked down his body to watch her hands move on him.
x.x.x
Lying on the couch, watching Kate watch a movie as he held her in his arms, he could have cared less that it was nearing midnight. He felt a sense of completion, a contentment that he didn't know he was capable of. He thought it might be an awkward transition for them, something they stuttered stepped through, but after drying off and getting Beckett's bandages back in place, they simple went downstairs and ate dinner.
They laughed and teased, almost like nothing had happened. Only almost, because to find himself touching and being touched throughout dinner for no reason other than contact, had been a definite shift in things for them. He didn't know what any of it meant. He knew what he would like it all to mean, but he was happy just to have this moment with her and worry about tomorrow when they got there.
His phone started singing and he knew the ringtone for the bone doctor as "The toe bone's connected to the foot bone, the foot bone's connected to the ankle bone, the slide is connected to the trombone. . ."
Kate was laughing as he wriggled his arm out from under her so he could get up. "What?" he asked as he made his way to the kitchen to grab his phone off the counter.
"The Animaniacs? Really?" She asked with a hint of sarcastic surprise.
He laughed, "You're the one that recognized it." He teased as he swiped his phone off the counter. Hitting the button to answer it, "What's up, Doc?" he asked, falling into the familiarity of cartoon land.
"I wanted to make sure you were awake before I sent you the number for a video chat, we have some results." She told him, no nonsense as always.
"Go ahead, I'll sign on to my laptop and see you in a minute." He told her. She hung up without further comment.
Kate was looking at him strangely, but he held up a finger so that she would wait while he grabbed the laptop out of his office. He joined her on the couch again a moment later. As the computer was booting up he received a text and explained to Beckett that he had sent the x-rays and crime scene photos to a friend.
"Is this the friend from the story you were going to tell me about later?" she asked, remembering his phone call earlier.
He nodded, "She's interesting, in a kind of weird way that fascinated me right from the beginning."
"Oh yeah?" she asked, a teasing note in her voice and he was once again struck by the subtle changes in her. She wasn't being snarky about him knowing some woman, just asking with a genuine hint of curiosity.
As he went through the process of getting online and logging into the chat he explained how he had met her at the awards ceremony in DC, their similar jobs as civilian crime fighters by day, novelists by night. "So, I was introduced to her with the title of Doctor in front of her name and my first thought was, great another boring technical writer, some kind of medical journal or something got her here. I said to her, 'Hey, Doc, I got this rash.' You know, joking of course and she's completely serious as she tells me, 'I am not a medical doctor.' I tried to explain to her that I was joking and she said something along the lines of 'I don't know what that means.' Fascinating. She's like an evolutionary leap backwards in the pop-culture timeline."
Kate looked ready to ask a question, but just then the video chat opened up and he saw her with a backdrop that looked entirely like work, and he thought Kate had a problem with dedication to her work.
"Good to see you're in one piece." He said by way of greeting.
"What do you mean?" she inquired through the screen and he saw the tips of Kate's lips turn up slightly as she began to get an understanding of the other woman's innate quirkiness.
"When we got off the phone earlier there was a loud crash, sounded like you were in the middle of a raid or something."
"Yes, of course, I did not intend for you to hear that. I'm sorry if I worried you." Her tone was even as if she were passing on the apology more from what he had heard her state was a 'social norm' than because it was even necessary.
"Hopefully you caught the guy." Castle said.
"Not yet, but we will." She gestured off camera and a moment later another woman came into the screen beside her. "This is Angela, she works with me and she put together what you're about to see."
Castle gestured for Kate to scoot over closer to him as he made introductions, "This is Detective Beckett, the reason I called. Beckett, this is Dr. Temperance Brennan of the Jeffersonian."
"I know." She told him before turning to the screen. "I've read your books, they're really good."
Acknowledging the comment with only a cursory nod, Brennan clicked something and a video of the inner hand bones played on the screen showing various cracks, shatters and breaks in sequence. Brennan explained, "There are multiple transverse micro fractures along the Radius, the trapezium suffered a multi-fragmentary fracture, resulting in six or seven pieces, though it is not clear from the X-rays. The scaphoid was pushed into the lunate causing a compacted fracture and that may also account for the transverse fracture that appears to be on the Ulna."
"Ok, so he broke his wrist, we knew that." Castle said, trying to get to the point.
"Angela has designed a recreation of events based on the information we have available." Brennan continued, ignoring his initial question. "As you can see, the shoe was forced onto the hand with a distinctive motion. It indicates the person who caused this energy was moving very heavily on the balls of their feet."
As she explained another graphic played across the screen and it only took a minute for realization to strike. "He wasn't stomped on, he was stepped on."
Kate's eyes met his suddenly, "Tripped over." She elaborated.
Brennan interrupted, "That is one of the scenarios we posited and the one with the most logical interpretation to match the crime scene photos."
"Palmer didn't do it." Kate interrupted, looking at him with concern on her face.
Castle, while usually glad to be told he was right, especially coming from her, simply shrugged and turned back to the anthropologist, hoping she might have some more insight.
"Is there any chance you'll detach the limb and send it here for processing?" she asked, sounding completely certain.
"Sorry, Bren, our guy has a little much flesh to be throwing in that boiler you told me about." He responded.
Once they had ended the conference call he felt Kate's hand squeezing his as she considered him with an expression of surprised realization, "What about Alexis?"
x.x.x
A/N: Sorry. I got a little hung up not knowing where to start this chapter because I didn't want the story to turn into a giant smut-fest, even though the characters have their own ideas and are fighting with me to stay in bed. So I took a break and wrote the epilogue for my other story that I'd been meaning to write since this one sucked me into its evil vortex of sleep deprivation last month.
Hope I didn't lose you all with the ratings change, but I don't think I'll be able to get these two to behave now that I've done that to them.
Review that made my day, sarahlovesa, for some incredibly inspiring words that make me just a little nervous that I'll let you all down.
Thank you, everyone for reading.