"I want her life..."
Detective Karpowski poured more milk into her coffee as she watched her fellow female detective lazily stirring her coffee while her mind was clearly wandering elsewhere. "Whose life, Stegner?" As if I had to ask...
"Detective Beckett," sighed Stegner. She sipped her cappuccino slowly, letting the jolt from the caffeine shake her back into reality. "I mean c'mon, who wouldn't? Having a rich, attractive novelist change his playboy ways to follow you around all day, buy you coffee and flowers and write books telling the world how fabulous he thinks you are?"
"Castle didn't buy her the flowers," Ryan chimed in from his spot next to his fellow detectives, while getting ready to run his own espresso.
Two pairs of eyes leveled determined stares at Ryan. "Castle *didn't* buy her all those *expensive* red roses?" asked Karpowski. "Then who did?"
Ryan immediately realized he had said too much. "Uh...a friend?" he guessed, trying and failing to placate the women in front of him.
The women pressed forward as a unit, determined to extract a new juicy tidbit of gossip from their cornered colleague. "A friend, huh?" Stegner repeated. "No way it was that medical examiner," she commented to Karpowski, "she makes the same kind of pay that we do..."
"Which ain't that much," added Karpowski.
"Exactly," agreed Stegner. "So it has to be a friend of Castle's...James Patterson, maybe?"
Ryan shook his head nervously, but the fear in his eyes encouraged to women to press on. "Was it Stephen King?" asked Karpowski, "because If that man is that romantic I just might go out and buy his books, scary or not..."
"It...it wasn't Stephen King," Ryan stammered out nervously. "It wasn't a writer..."
The two women considered the clue that the other detective had just given them. "Maybe it wasn't one of Castle's friends..." declared Stegner, challenging her earlier assumption. A lightbulb went off in Stegner's mind as she noticed who else was missing from the bullpen that morning. "It was your partner, wasn't it? He's trying to make a play for Beckett!"
Ryan's eyes widened in shock. "M-my...my *partner*?"
Karpowski latched on to her friend's idea, accentuated as it was by Ryan's clearly growing sense of panic. "Of *course*!" exclaimed Karpowski. "It makes perfect sense..."
"Really?" asked Stegner, surprised at how quickly her friend jumped on her bandwagon. "I think it's kind of sad, myself..."
"You think so?" asked Karpowski, now confused.
"Well, yeah," commented Stegner, "I mean, now that he's seeing his friends pair off, instead of finding a girl of his own, Esposito makes a play for one of the ones who's already taken? Totally sad."
"It is kinda 'My Best Friend's Wedding' of him," agreed Karpowski.
Ryan was growing desperate to get out of this increasingly bizarre conversation. "You know," he tried to lie as he backed slowly out of the break room, "you guys are *absolutely* right. I'm going to go find my partner and try to talk some sense into him..."
His declaration was ignored. Stegner and Karpowski had totally immersed in their own world of girl gossip, giving Ryan his much-desired opportunity to take his coffee and run.
Hi all! Apparently there is some interest in making this longer than the one-shot I planned. So I hope you liked this little add-on. :-) I have a few more ideas to take this further, but I will warn you guys that my top writing priority is still the Four Winds AU series (see my author page for details). So while I will update this story, the updates will be short and probably somewhat sporadic in nature. This will mostly get updated when I'm stuck in writers block on the Four Winds stories. And don't worry; that happens more often than you'd think. ;)
Anyway, comments are welcome, especially since this is my first attempt at flat-out humor. I'd love to hear what you think!
