FIVE

"Hello? Hello? Meredith? Yes…yes I can hear you now." Castle sighed and skimmed his fingertips across his left eyebrow when his wife's shrill voice was once again in his ear. Their call had dropped twice already as he was trying to explain his predicament to Meredith and make sure she understood that she needed to be the one to pick up Alexis from school.

"Pickup time is four o'clock at the south entrance, but you really should try to get there a bit early; I have no idea what traffic is going to be like. It's horrendous where we are… Wha—no you cannot just wait in the cab. Alexis doesn't know you're the one coming and… Four o'clock. Four! No, you cannot go at five instead. Jesus, Meredith, I never ask—it's just this one time, and… Fine. Fine I'll try my mother, but if I cannot get ahold of her you have to…."

Castle groaned when he heard the phone line click due to Meredith abruptly ending the call. He sucked in a deep breath and slowly counted to five before exhaling for the same slow count. This method of calming himself felt necessary after every interaction with his wife those days. Considering he had done the school pick up on ninety-nine percent of Alexis's school days to date, he did not find it at all unreasonable that he was asking Meredith to take care of it on such short notice, especially given the weather event. She of course had an appointment which for all he knew meant she was in his lover's bed. If that was the case, he would be even more furious at her for throwing in his face that he would not be in this predicament if he wasn't so dead set on "playing stupid police games."

When Castle tried to call his mother but could not get the line to connect, he heaved out a sigh and dropped his head back against the car headrest. After a moment he heard a soft, "I'm sorry Meredith is being difficult."

He let out a grunt and said, "Well, it's nothing new."

"I texted Grant and told him I didn't think I'd make it home in time for dinner; he'd wasn't thrilled."

"Did you guys have specific plans?"

She shook her head. "No, no; he just doesn't like when I'm not home right after my shift ends, which would be at 4:30 today."

Castle flattened his lips into a straight line and said, "Well, you already know my opinion on his opinion of your job."

At that point in his relationship with the detective, Castle would have disliked any man that was her husband due to his ridiculous jealousy over the fact that her husband was able to spend evenings curled beside her and Castle was not. When it came to Grant Symon, however, Castle's distaste had more layers than an onion.

Castle had been working with Kate for several months when he first met her husband. He had invited the duo over to one of his poker nights, thinking it might be a fun way for them to get to know each other. He'd even convinced Meredith to stay for the start of the game so they could all be introduced to one another. Grant had been cordial and a decent poker player, but strait-laced and dull seeming enough that Castle knew they wouldn't ever be friends.

Over the next few months, he was able to get to know the man a bit better thanks to working with and spending a decent amount of time around Kate. She told him that Grant worked in corporate law and was making his way towards achieving junior partner status. Unlike her parents, his were not lawyers, but his grandfather had been and apparently Grant was quite close to the man during his youth. When Grant wasn't working (which did not happen too frequently due to aforementioned partner aspirations), he liked to read and work on his stamp collection. Upon learning that fact Castle laughed like a hyena, thinking Kate to be joking, but she was not. Evidently, stamp collecting was another trait picked up from his beloved grandfather, which Castle begrudgingly admitted was rather nice.

It wasn't until they met up again as a group and Castle and Kate had been relaying a thrilling tale about a suspect chase through Chinatown that Castle got his first glimpse of Grant's opinion on Kate's profession. While Meredith was appropriately enthusiastic about the story, Grant remained stone-faced. He'd even made an under-his-breath comment about it being foolish that Castle suspected Kate heard but ignored. Unable to resist himself, he asked her about Grant's sour attitude the next time they saw one another, and she'd simply brushed it off as, "Grant doesn't really like police stories," but Castle suspected there was more to it than that. In the coming months, he learned that hunch was correct.

When Kate finally confessed to him that Grant found her work to be unimportant and entirely undeserving of the hours she put towards it, Castle had been outright offended. How dare a man who sat in his ivory tower filled with handshake deals that mostly succeeded in making the wealthy wealthier even begin to fault the altruistic nature of Kate's work: spending tireless hours trying to rid the streets of criminals, to make the city safer one arrest at a time. He simply couldn't process it. He, a man who had enough wealth that he truly never had to work another day in his life if he didn't want to, chose to be there multiple days a week because he was also driven to make the city a safe place; to do something that made an impact, to do something that mattered. He was proud of Kate and the work that she did; the fact that her husband felt oppositely made him sick.

Since they'd grown progressively closer over the prior year, castle had voiced his thoughts on the Grant situation several times, each of which Kate would quietly thank him for his sentiments, but never go into too much detail about her own thoughts. Still, he could read her expressions well enough to suspect that she was not overly happy with her husband's attitude towards her job. It simply was one of the items on a very long list of things that made their marriage challenging. He was all too familiar with such a list as he had one of his own.

"What are you doing?" Castle asked a few minutes later when Kate pulled her cruiser off the main road into a parking lot, above which was a sign that read Jamacia Inn.

"Well, I don't know about you, but I have to pee so bad I think my bladder is about to explode."

Castle let out a groan. "Well, yeah, I've just been trying not to think about it."

"I'm starting to feel a bit sick, actually, so I gotta go. I'm hoping this hotel has a bathroom in the lobby. We circled this block a few times trying to get around all the traffic and I don't see around—nor do I see a gas station."

"Fair enough."

She parked the car in the first available space, but they still needed to sprint a few hundred feet to reach the hotel's entrance. The inside was cramped, dark, and had a musty smell, which Castle mostly attributed to the deluge outside. A shiver traveling up his spine, he followed Kate to the front desk where a woman with dark skin and hair stood reading a magazine and loudly popping chewing gum.

"Hi, excuse me, do you have a bathroom I could use?"

The girl behind the desk didn't even bother to look up when she said, "No."

Undeterred, Kate pulled the badge off her hip and tapped it against the desk. "Please? We've been out on the road several hours."

The woman looked at the badge, then at Kate, and then back down to the badge before saying, "No, sorry; it's policy."

Knowing there was no way he was going back out into the rain without using a toilet somewhere in that building, Castle stepped up to the counter, flashed his schmoozing smile and said, "Hi, is there a room available?"

The woman shifted her gaze between Kate and Castle for several seconds before saying, "We don't rent by the hour."

"Understood. Do you have a room for one night?"

"Yeah. The base rate is $219 per night unless you want a King bed. Then its $239."

"A standard room is fine." As he reached into his back pocket for his wallet, he heard Kate softly say his name, but he shook his head. After all they'd been through that day, $219 seemed like a bargain to be out of the elements, even if it was only for a little while.

After processing his credit card, the woman handed them a room key and directed them towards an elevator that would take them to the third floor, where their room, number 307, was located. The elevator made a squeaking sound as it ascended that made Castle want to grip onto the walls just in case the pully broke and sent them plummeting towards the basement. Thankfully, they ascended safely, and room 307 was not located too far away from the elevator.

"You go ahead into the bathroom first," Castle told his partner as he unlocked the door. She thanked him and slipped past him into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. Castle stepped all the way into the room, which seemed incredibly dated, but clean looking. There were two double beds with rose colored comforters atop them. Across from the beds was a dresser on which sat a small flat screen television, and on the far wall was a window which would have allowed them to take in the sights of Jamacia, Queens, were it not for the fact that it was being slashed with too much rain to be able to see through it.

A minute later when he heard the bathroom door creak open, Castle turned, smiled at his partner, and asked, "Feel better?"

"A thousand percent."

He chuckled at the sound of her relief and then hurried past her so he could feel the same. Once he'd finished, he returned to the main hotel room and found her gazing out—or, rather, attempting to gaze out—the window down onto the street. "So…what's the plan?"

Letting out a deep breath she confessed, "I…I'm actually wondering if we should stay the night here. Or, at the very least, camp out until much, much later. We're just wasting gas driving around in circles—plus we've almost run out of places to go; there's just too much flooding."

Castle nodded, as he'd had similar thoughts about hunkering down. It almost seemed impractical not to, for the last thing he wanted was for their cars to be one of the ones trapped by high water and in need of a rescue. "Yeah, I think you're right. If I recall correctly, the forecast said the worst of the rain should be over around five or six o'clock, though it will continue raining through the evening."

"Right, and flood waters can rise even after the rain stops." She added, rubbing her fingers across her forehead. Then, giving him a defeated look, she said, "I just don't think there's any way we can make it back to Manhattan tonight."

He nodded, agreeing. Then, with the shrug of one shoulder, he said, "Sorry your stuck with me."

She laughed and smiled for the first time in hours. "That's not even close to being one of my concerns, Castle. Listen, um… I need to call our location into dispatch and update them on our situation. Then I'll see what sort of emergency supplies I have insofar as food."

"Okay. I can check with the woman at the front desk to see if they have any toiletry kits available. And maybe there's a vending machine? I'm just going to try and call Mother again first."

She nodded. "Sure thing. I'll be back in a little bit."

Once she had departed, Castle pulled his phone out of his pocket and gazed down at it with a heavy sigh. He wasn't mad about the situation, truly. It was no one's fault that the rains were much worse than anticipated, and he certainly didn't mind a little adventure in the outer boroughs; the last thing he wanted was for life to be too predictable. Still, Meredith would be unhappy, and that would make him unhappy—probably for several weeks as she'd continue to punish him for it. He wasn't sure what part she would be the maddest about: the fact that she was forced to be a solo parent for half a day, or the fact that he'd be holed up with Kate. Perhaps if Alexis could stay with his mother, it wouldn't be as bad, but he hated to put her out. As much as Martha Rodgers did not want to admit it, she was getting older, and this was a hell of a storm to send her out in. Still, of the two adult red heads in his life, she was the more responsible, which truly was saying something.

With a deep breath, he began to dial his mother's number, thinking that at least there was one positive to their predicament: more uninterrupted time with Kate.

When her first step out of the elevator resulted in a stabbing pain in her left ankle and shin, Kate cursed under her breath. Of course, she had to be moving too fast in this god-forsaken weather. Of course, she'd encountered a pothole in the parking lot. And, of course, she had tripped and made her spectacularly terrible day even more terrible.

As she knocked on the hotel room door and waited for Castle to open it (he had the only key), Kate balanced on her right foot while lifting up her left leg and gently moving her ankle around. It didn't hurt too bad when there wasn't weight on it, so that had to be a good sign, right?

"Hi, thanks." She muttered when the writer opened the door and stepped aside so she could enter.

"Hey, wait—are you limping?"

She turned her head towards him and grimaced. "I tripped in the parking lot and rolled my ankle."

"Oh no! Did you fall?"

"I sort of…half-fell. I didn't go all the way down. I just stumbled into that concrete planter out front…" Her voice drifted off as she held out her hands to him, showing them covered in dirt and grit that, surprisingly, the torrents of rain had not rinsed off.

"C'mon," he said, pointing her in the direction of the bathroom. "Let's get you cleaned up."

He directed her to sit on the toilet so that he could assess her wounds. He grabbed one of the white washcloths off the towel rack, ran it under the sink tap, and then began dabbing gently at the palms of her hands. "I don't see any bleeding. Do they hurt?"

"Not really; they're just a little scuffed up."

Castle said nothing; he just continued to clean up her palms until no more dirt remained. Then, he asked her to remind him which leg was injured. When she told him, he sunk down to the floor and began to unzip her boot. She said, "Oh you don't…AH!" Her protest was cut off by a yelp of discomfort as the boot slid past her ankle.

"Sorry, sorry. Let's just take a look here, nice and gentle." His tone of voice reminded her of a father's, which probably was because he was one. She wondered briefly how many times Alexis had fallen down and scraped her knee or hands and how many of those time's she'd gone running to him to make it all better.

"Does this feel sore?" Castle asked, as he ran his fingers across the front of her ankle.

"No."

"And this?" he asked, doing the same with her Achilles tendon.

"It's fine."

He continued to carefully move her foot around in increasingly larger motions until she gasped out when he flexed her foot so that it was at a ninety-degree angle to her body. "Oohh sorry, sorry. Let's just check for bruising." Without hesitation, he pulled off her black sock and gazed all around her ankle, which showed nothing other than some pressure marks from the sock. "Hmm I don't see anything yet and it doesn't seem swollen, but we should probably try and catch it before it does. I found an ice machine earlier when I was looking for snacks—I'll go get you some ice."

"Oh no—no, you don't-"

"It's really no problem. I'll be right back." After flashing her a grin, he stood quickly and practically jogged out the door.

Kate remained seated on the toilet feeling rather shell-shocked for several moments before she caught sight of her sock on the floor and felt the rushing heat of discomfort flood through her body. While Castle's actions had easily fallen more into the range of "clinical" than "salacious" he had still by technical definition begun to undress her, and she truly wasn't sure what to think about that.

She reached for the sock, dragged it over her foot, and then pushed herself into a standing position. Leaving her boot behind, she hobbled her way to the closest bed and sat down so she could stretch her left leg out, knowing that elevation of the injured area would also reduce swelling. As she sat there with her hands cupping her cheeks, Kate could not help but think about Grant.

While she was down in her vehicle, she'd tried to call him, but he hadn't answered, so she merely texted and said that the rains would keep her in Queens most likely overnight, but she'd be back in touch if there were any updates. She could only imagine how irritated he would be when he read that message, so it was just as well that they didn't connect over the phone. Actually, it was just as well that Grant wasn't there at all, as their predicament surely would have made him quite annoyed.

Over their many years together, Kate had learned that one of Grant's main triggers for a sour mood was tardiness followed closely there after by interrupted schedules or deviations from preset plans. Unless their specific plan for the day was to not have a plan (ironic, though he had declared such a day several times over the course of their relationship) if anything did not go according to the way Grant thought it should, his annoyance increased exponentially until they were able to right the situation again. Even were it not for the main purpose of her trip being for her job, had Grant been riding with her, every closed road, every slowdown of traffic and, most likely, ever scrape of the windshield wipers against the glass would have snarled his attitude into one that was almost unsalvageable; she shuddered at the mere thought of it and once again felt thankful that he wasn't there with her.

Just a few moments later Castle blasted back into the hotel room muttering curses and yelps. She heard a distinctive clinking sound against the bathroom counter and then, after a minute, he came out with a balled-up washcloth. A guilty expression on his face, he said, "They didn't have any bags for the ice so I just…well, here"

"Oh, Castle," she half-gasped, half-laughed. "Did you bring the ice back bare-handed? You didn't have to do that?"

He smiled and plopped the washcloth atop her injured ankle. "It's no problem, Beckett."

As she watched him adjust the ice-filled cloth so that it was covering as much as her ankle as it could without the ice spilling out onto the bedspread, the only thing Kate could think was, Grant would never do this. She recalled one time the prior year during one of the rare occasions that she was cooking a meal from scratch. While trying to chop some rather stubborn vegetables, she'd slipped and cut her hand pretty badly. She'd called out to him for assistance, but he'd merely thrown her a box of bandages from the edge of the kitchen, because he didn't like blood. Even with an incident like this, where no blood was involved, she doubted he'd be as helpful. If he'd discovered there were no bags for the ice he'd probably just tell her she'd be fine—or maybe buy her a chilled soda from a vending machine to use instead. She was certain he would never have brought the ice back by hand, but perhaps such a comparison was unfair. Richard Castle was certainly unique in a variety of ways.

"Oh, let me help you with this other boot."

"I can take my own boot off, Castle."

"Nah, you just relax. They're probably still wet from the rain, right? My shoes definitely are." He knelt down and pulled off her other boot before lifting it up and shaking his head. Looking over to her he said, "Never understood how you were able to run in these things."

"Practice," she told him.

"Witchcraft," he responded.

She laughed. Then asked, "Hey wait, you said something about snacks?"

He gave her a hesitant look. "Yeah, but don't get too excited. Carmela at the front desk informed me that the only vending machine was for staff use, but after I gave her a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill she let me buy two things, so I got Peanut M&Ms and a pack of cheese crackers—I figured we could share."

Her eyes narrowed. "You gave her a hundred bucks and you only got two things?"

He shrugged helplessly. "She was quite the negotiator. Plus, it wasn't a real vending machine. It was just one of those tray things that are brought in by services; there wasn't much there. There is a soda machine with the ice machine, but it's out of everything except diet root beer and water."

Kate immediately scrunched her nose as she hated root beer, especially the diet kind, to which Castle responded, "I know, I know; I got you water. I also found out that there is a bodega a block and a half away so maybe if this rain goes from deluge to drizzle we can go find something with more substance later on."

"Sounds like a plan."

"Were you able to contact dispatch okay?"

"Yeah. Unsurprisingly, it's a total mess along most of the coastal and low-lying areas. And they've started to shut down a lot of the subway lines."

"I can imagine."

"Oh, but I did find this." Kate leaned to the side so she could pull the rectangular object from her back pocket. She placed the deck of cards on the bed in between them and smiled at him. "Must have been left over from a stakeout or something."

"Cool. So…strip poker?"

She gave him a look. "Funny."

"How about regular poker?"

"Um," she hesitated, having felt progressively more tired since sitting down on the bed. "How about something a little less thought intensive? All that stressful driving today is starting to catch up to me."

"Sure. How about…Go Fish?"

She agreed with a light laugh. "Sure."

Castle won the first round they played and then he gathered up all the cards to shuffle them thoroughly before they played again. Kate watched his strong hands move together, shuffling, separating, then shuffling again. This was something he'd obviously done hundreds of times whether for his special writers' poker games or for a game he was playing with Alexis. Kate watched his hands move together again and again and then suddenly felt a tingle at the base of her neck. She wondered—

No, no she wasn't going to wonder that. God, what was wrong with her? This was hardly the first time she and Castle had spent time by themselves. Why did it feel like suddenly she was unable to think about anything other than the thing she'd barred herself from thinking about?

Because you've been forcing yourself not to think about that thing for over a year now and your brain is exhausted, she answered to herself. The truth of it was: the more time passed, and the more miserable she felt with Grant, and the more comfortable she felt with Castle it was infinitely harder to keep those thoughts out of her mind.

"Do you have any eights?"

"Wha—oh, um, no. Go fish."

The writer tilted his head to the side as he gazed at her. "You okay? We don't have to play if you'd rather rest."

"Oh no—no I'm fine. I was just, um, just thinking about how crazy today was. We were on the road for four and a half hours, going in big giant circles for the last hour of that time." While this was a slight fib for that present moment, she had been thinking about their wild journey when she was in her car listening to the chaos happening over the police radio. She had a suspicion that the current storm would be a historic one for the New York area—and unfortunately come with some losses of life.

"Yeah, it was definitely crazy, but you know me, Beckett. I'm always up for a good adventure. Especially with you." He added with a large grin.

She couldn't help but smile in his reflection. "Yeah, same. You're definitely much easier to…" She let her voice drift off when she second-guessed saying her thought aloud, but of course her partner wouldn't let her get away with that. When he asked what she meant she said, "Just…just that I'm glad I was traveling with you today instead of Grant."

The writer lowered his hand of cards to his lap and said carefully, "Well, Grant would never have come with you for a case."

She practically snorted with laughter; what a ridiculous idea that was, the notion of Grant helping with one of her cases. He would never. "Well, no, but I mean… you were good at helping me figure out what direction to try next and you helped when we got stuck on the off ramp. Grant would have never stopped complaining if his feet got that wet and grousing about all the rain, and…well you've always been easy to partner with, that's all." She then cleared her throat and said, "Have any threes?"

He didn't look at his hand. He just kept staring at her for ten more seconds before sighing out her name.

"What?" she responded.

"It's just… we're alone here in this room. No one else is around. Don't you think we should just be honest with each other?"

"I am being honest with you," she said, notable confusion in her tone. She wasn't really sure how she could have been much more honest with him, especially since the fact that they were alone together was what made her confess that he was an easy partner to have. She definitely would not have said that if they were back at the twelfth, especially not with Ryan or Esposito within earshot.

"Okay, then I'll be honest, too." He threw down his hand of cards, looked her in the eye and said, "I'm in love with you."