A/N: Happy New Year. And on we go...
Slow Burn
Chapter 21
"Castle?" She can hear him singing in the shower, even with her head buried halfway inside a huge cardboard box.
He makes her smile all the time, she's discovering. No matter how stressful the domestic situation, the man can make her smile. In fact, she's laughed more in the last week than she can ever remember, and she has loved more, too.
She goes into the bedroom and pops her head around the bathroom door. The singing volume is a lot louder in here, amplified by the tiled walls and floor, by simple proximity.
"Rick!" she yells. "Have you seen my white shirts? I'm sure I unpacked them last night." There were six of them, still wrapped in plastic from the dry cleaner. She can't find them anywhere.
Castle's head appears amidst a cloud of steam from the huge, glass shower enclosure. When he sees her standing there in just her work pants, high-heeled boots, and a nude bra, he grins like a crazy person.
"I'm gonna deny all knowledge of your shirts' current whereabouts, detective if it means you'll accompany me to work this morning dressed like that." He makes his eyebrows dance like a marionette.
Kate shakes her head and reaches for a towel, which she tosses at her partner's naked torso. "Tell me where the shirts are…" She gives him a sexy stare, her hands on her hips.
Castle rubs his hair vigorously, pausing to ask, "And?"
Not "or," she notes because he wants a reward not the threat of punishment.
She thinks for a second or tries to think like Castle who operates on a kind of childlike barter system. "And…I'll book dinner Friday night. Somewhere…intimate."
"You'll wear a dress?"
She nods. "I'll wear a dress…and no underwear."
"Done!" Castle yells. "Shirts are in the closet. Third shelf down." As Kate rushes away, he calls after her, "Don't mess up my folding! I've got it looking like a SoHo boutique in there." He grins to himself while he finishes toweling off.
The weekend was more fun than stressful after they made it through brunch with Kate's father. Jim seemed immensely pleased for both of them when they announced their engagement. To Kate's relief, her father applied no pressure as to timeframe, no questions over a venue, guest list, or where she might look for a dress. It was refreshing, as much as it was tinged with sadness for the hole in their joy where her mother should have been. They haven't really had time to draw breath themselves to talk about what either of them has in mind as far as a wedding goes. But Kate is grateful for the calm, for the chance to get used to the huge changes life seems intent on sliding her way.
Sunday, they arrived early at Kate's apartment to begin boxing up her belongings. They worked from a list she spent the last week compiling. The movers came late in the afternoon, by which time they were both exhausted.
Castle started out as more of a hindrance than a help, using the opportunity to pick through Kate's things, stopping to look at books or ask for stories about odd little knickknacks she'd brought back from long-ago trips overseas.
When she asked him to empty her underwear from its drawer into a packing box, he was unable to do so without holding items up to the light, touching them, even pressing them to his face to inhale any lingering trace of her. When she caught him doing that she assigned him the more impersonal task of packing unwanted pots and pans for Goodwill.
By the end of the day, he'd gotten over this giddy spell and become an extra pair of willing hands, and a true ally; the cheerful, upbeat partner she'd come to rely on.
Kate sat down with him during a break for lunch. They ate sandwiches delivered by the local deli and drank coffee from to-go cups, curled up together on her sofa while an old movie played in the background. As the credits rolled, she gently reminded him that he would have all the time in the world to learn every silly story that came with her possessions as soon as they were safely installed in the loft. After that, he worked diligently from her detailed list, directing the movers to load all the items that were coming to Broome Street onto the back of the truck. The rest they arranged to donate or held back for bulk curbside pickup.
Once the apartment was empty, she took his hand, touring the space for one last time.
"Feeling a little sad?" he asked as they stood at the threshold to her bedroom staring at the space that had once housed her bed.
Kate shook her head. "Excited to move on." She turned to face him. "We have some good memories here. Both of us. More than you'd know," she said a little cryptically. "But we have new memories to make, and I'm excited to move on." She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.
"Rick!" she calls out now from the kitchen where she's pouring coffee into matching travel mugs. "We're going to be late."
She's feeling tired, which is understandable given the physical workout and stress of the move, to say nothing of the hours they've stayed awake at night making up for lost time in bed. Castle is finding it particularly difficult to get up at the same time as her, though he insists that he wants to.
The change that has startled her most is her constant need to touch him. One off-hand comment – what if we were getting married – and now they are getting married. It's as if she finally gave herself permission to feel again, and feeling again for Kate means touching her partner, wherever and whenever she can. She wakes in the night and finds herself turning to him, rousing him from sleep (and arousing him) with kisses, with the caress of her fingers, and, at five o'clock this morning, with her mouth.
She's learning so much about him, too. That he listens to classical music when he cooks. He spends more time at home being quiet and sitting still than she ever imagined him capable of. It's as if a switch flips when he comes through the front door of the loft and his batteries power down. And he's so patient, with his mother, with Alexis and her unending tribe of friends, and with Kate. He never snaps, never raises his voice, and he doesn't hold a grudge. No matter how tired or cranky the situation would make the average person, Castle remains cool, calm, and reasonable, always looking for a way to help, to fix whatever might be broken, to find a silver lining or a workaround. It is a special skill, a special kind of love he doles out to the world. She never thought it possible that she would fall more in love with him once she got to see him live his life up close. But she is, and each new revelation, no matter how small, feels like a blessing.
The call comes when they're in the car on the way to the precinct. A young woman has been found with her throat cut in an apartment on the Lower East Side. The dispatcher relays details of a report from the woman's neighbor of a man seen peering in through windows in the hours before the murder. Kate makes a sharp right, and they double back, heading south-east towards the scene in lower Manhattan.
They arrive at the location a few minutes behind the boys whose unmarked is parked at an untidy angle to the curb. Kate stopped saying, "Stay in the car," a long time ago. Her partner is still unarmed, but she trusts him to be careful even if today a strange uneasiness has begun churning her stomach.
The address they've come to is a rundown brownstone next to a narrow alley. It's one of only a couple on the block that has escaped the renovator's sledgehammer and the interior designer's paint chart. Kate gestures towards the garden-level entrance: a dark little doorway half-concealed beneath the stoop. The door is open. Raised voices come from inside, the angry sound amplified by the arch under the sandstone stairs.
She gestures to Castle. "Go around back," she whispers, taking off running for the open doorway with her gun drawn.
Castle knows he's being handled: given the safest, least fruitful (dangerous) position from which to see this one out. But for once, he does what he's told because, in truth, his head is in the clouds. He's going to marry her. He asked the question, she said yes and then she moved in with him. They share his bed at night and everything else in between, and he can honestly say that he's never been so happy in his entire life. Ever. Nothing he's tried in the past - the booze, the pills, the woman, scoring a table at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower on Millenium Eve - none of those things have brought him the happiness that a bowl of popcorn and a movie on the sofa at home with Kate has settled in his bones.
The side entrance to the backyard is a high wooden door covered in blistered green paint, rotted and jagged as a broken saw along the bottom. Castle trots the length of the ivy-covered wall with his heart hammering, mostly because he is entirely in thrall to Kate. To Kate and him. Their future, their wedding, their lives unfurling like a red carpet in front of him.
With his brain supplying this photo album of happy images, he fails to hear the rustle of vegetation on the other side of the wall, the gravel-scratch of rubber-soled boots on cracked concrete. Blood is pounding in his ears, his mood like a medicated high, and so he misses the metallic clatter of a fumbled latch and the scream of rusty hinges before it's too late.
A bulky, dark figure bursts out of the yard and into the alley just as Castle comes level with the gate. For a heart-stopping second the two men stare at one another. Terror is etched onto both of their faces and they appear to freeze. The suspect they're hunting reacts first. With a sharp blow from his right hand, he pistol-whips Castle, catching him with the butt of a handgun on his left temple. He brings the weapon down hard. Castle is unable to duck or dodge. He barely feels the contact at first, the crack of pain as his neck takes the force, his head thrown sideways, his vision blurred to black. He drops to the ground a dead weight, no hands to save him, jaw clamped tight as a vice, the flesh of his tongue pinioned between his teeth.
When he comes too, the flood of pain steals his breath away. He coughs, confused, and wet, phlegmy bubbles issue from his mouth in a fine spray. He leans over and spits. Strings of bloody saliva wet the mouldy wall.
There's shouting behind him, men's deep voices. The pounding of boots on the ground syncs up with the drumbeat in his skull. He fears he's cracked a tooth. Gingerly prodding the area with his tongue unleashes a whole new world of pain and something warm trickles down his chin.
He startles when he hears a cry of disbelief, recognizing the voice behind the animalistic sound through the fog of pain. Warm hands cup his face, fingers run through his hair, desperately. He hears Kate stifle a whimper and a curse. Forcing his eyes open, because one of them is already swelling shut, he finds her kneeling on the ground in front of him. She's smiling bravely, but there are tears in her eyes, and when she pulls back a little to check him for further damage, he sees the blood on her fingertips and panics.
"Shh, babe," she says. "Stay still." She turns around and yells frantically to anyone who'll listen. "Call a bus. Get it here now! Castle's down!"
He looks like a vampire. The blood is his, bright red and dribbling down his chin like a flash of wet paint. He feels like a vampire caught out in daylight with his skull-splitting headache and the damage to his tongue.
Kate looks like she wants to hold him, but there are too many people around. So she settles for gripping his hand then gives in and goes back to stroking his hair.
The suspect who beat him is lying face down on the ground, Esposito's boot pressed into the small of his back while Ryan tightens the cuffs. The perp turns his head to look at Castle and grins. He has a worked-over face: a crooked nose, a chipped front tooth, a single teardrop tattoo hinting at a stint inside.
Kate gets in Castle's way when the toe of Espo's boot finds the guy's kidney, blocking his view of this vengeful brutality. But he's one of them. He'd do the same. They'd all do the same. They are a family.
The boys haul the guy to his feet in a hail of foul-mouthed protestation, to the accompanying wail of an approaching ambulance.
Kate sticks by Castle's side until the paramedics force her to move back, the male-female team demanding space to examine him before they load him onto a gurney for transport.
In the back of the ambulance, he struggles against the gurney's restraints, fighting to sit up so that he can look for her. He spots the cuff of her white shirt a few yards away, pristine fabric now stained by his blood, the collar like a halo, still glowing brightly around her velvet-smooth neck. She's doubled over in the alley, vomiting behind a stained and abandoned mattress, one hand on her thigh, bracing, the other twisting her hair into a tight, punishing knot. He watches until the throb in his head and the gloved-hand of a paramedic force him to lie back down.
Panic seizes him when blood starts to pool in the back of his throat. He struggles, lungs begging for air, coughing, his feet flailing. Kate's smiling face hovering above him, once she climbs into the rig, settles him down. Like an angel, she takes his hand, blotting his mouth with some gauze as the doors slam shut, and they take off up the alley, bouncing over potholes with the siren blaring.
Her eyes stay glued to his, her face pale and etched with worry. He can feel how much she loves him in the grip of her fingers and the panic that keeps tightening her mouth, robbing them both of the beautiful smile she's bravely trying to keep alive.
In years gone by, he would have done anything to know her heart like this, to see her need for him written all over her face, his own pain and fear mirrored in her eyes.
Hell, even today, it's still damn pretty cool. He'll take it. He's got her. They made it.
If only he wasn't in so much pain.
TBC...