Misconception
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"That's too bad," he growls, "because I'm not going to stop kissing you."
She laughs, and he feels her body thrumming and strong against his, her arms winding around his neck. "Good, because I'm done with talking. I hate talking. It just messes things up."
"I think it's made things pretty clear," he says. "In between the parts where we were breaking each other's hearts."
"I didn't mean to," she whispers, her mouth a warm line at the corner of his lips. "I'm not trying to break your heart."
"That's okay," he forgives. And he angles his mouth and sucks lightly at the down-turned sadness of hers. She tastes like chocolate and peppermint, like the Andes mint he left in her drawer at the 12th, by accident really, and why is it turning him on that she touches his stuff just as much as he touches hers? "So long as you're not trying to do it, we'll be good."
"It feels too easy," she says.
"Are you kidding me?" He pulls back only a little, narrowing his eyes, but her hand catches at the back of his neck and squeezes.
"Get back here, Castle," she mutters. "Seriously, I'm done with talking. Over. I'll do all my communicating with my mouth."
He smiles widely because he doesn't think she gets what she just said, and he dips forward and touches his tongue to the line of her jaw until she shudders. "Well, that's good because I want to hear you, every noise, every oh God, every-"
"Oh, you will." Her voice is so deliciously rough, and he feels her leg wind around his, press them intimately closer. "Soon, very soon, if you don't stop teasing."
"Did I hear stop?"
"Are you being dense on purpose?" she says, and, oh God, it sounds like she's whining in his ear. Whining. Sex-starved whining. The kind that involves her hips rocking into him and futzing out his brain.
This is no good.
He grips the back of her thigh and hikes her leg up, driving her back and onto the kitchen counter. Kate moans, gripping his neck, their bodies colliding again. They clatter into the barstools and she catches one before it can tip back - a deft and impossibly flexible hook of her foot - and he's impressed and turned on, and this is no good at all.
"Not on the counter, Castle-" she says, reading his mind. Wrapping her legs around his waist. Pressing herself against him. Hot and tight, her mouth moving just under his ear. "I want to do things to you. You might not survive it when you hit the floor."
God. "My luck, someone would come home right-"
"Oh, God," she groans, burying her face in his neck and pinching his skin.
He winces but the sharp of her nails is memory too, and his body knows exactly. "Not quite how I remembered that sounding, but-"
"Not on the damn counter," she grinds out, her voice and her hips, and he's learned now to listen to both her body and her words, because she means them both.
She meant it, that night in the hotel, even when she ran away. She meant love when she danced against him, close and warm, she meant love when she undressed him in the room and clutched him and then flipped him over and did devastating things with her hips and her hands and her body swaying above his.
This is really no good at all. This is ending before it begins if he can't get her somewhere horizontal and padded (a rug would be fine, even with the rug burn; it would be entirely fine, oh God, Kate-)
Her legs squeeze around him, her body arches, her mouth sucking a nice, painful mark just above his collarbone. She's going to kill him. She's already killed him, so dead he's alive in the worst and most excruciating, amazing ways.
Not on the counter, he chants to himself. Not on the counter. He's wound so tight, he's not sure he can coordinate anything but right on the counter.
No, no, no - he really wants to see her, all of her, every inch he memorized that night with touch and lips. To have her in the perfect setting of his bedroom with her hair a dark contrast to his beige sheets, her cream-colored skin like the swirl of milk before subsumed in coffee, and even narrating it in his head with her body wrapped around him and his hands gripping her flesh is doing things he can't control. He has to have more, forever, always.
"I can't stop," she breathes. "Oh, God, - Rick - your hands-"
"I can't carry you," he admits. She gasps a little, laughing, and he realizes maybe she wasn't asking him to, but just commenting on what he was already doing to her. "I'd love to carry you, but right now I'm pretty sure I'd break something - a vase, you, the table, my back. The list goes on."
She laughs and slides right off the counter, right down his body, torturous and wonderful, and her hand finds him, a little action that makes his eyes slam shut and a curse fall out. His hands brace himself on the granite, bowing over against her, instantly unable to function.
"And not the table either," she hums. "At least not yet. We'll work up to it." Her hands trace along his forearms and take his hands from the counter, laughing again - she's so bright and joyful and aroused, look at her, gorgeous, gorgeous Kate - and she laces their fingers together, brings his knuckles up to kiss them, one joint after another, bone by bone, ten soft, beautiful kisses.
His heart flips over in his chest. He wants to marry her right now. He wants to hide his face between her legs and-
"I'm taking you to bed," she says softly, but her whole body is fierce.
He follows, allured, once more a believer.
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