"No, no, a thousand times no, Castle."
"See, your voice is saying no, but I see a maybe in your eyes."
"Out," she says, pointing at the door with a crutch. There's not really a maybe in her eyes – she looks very, very serious.
Castle pauses next to the bed in the guestroom, waiting to see if she'll relent, but her jaw is clenched. He knows if he pushes his luck she won't agree to stay with him after tonight. "What if –"
He must look stupidly pathetic, because her voice isn't as sharp when she cuts him off. "Castle, I know you're trying to help, I do. I'm even willing to acknowledge that your primary purpose in suggesting that we share a bed is, astoundingly, not sex. But you just broke up with the woman you've been seeing for months. Your daughter is here and I don't want her getting the wrong idea. And I am perfectly used to sleeping alone."
He sighs, stares at her for several seconds, and finally walks out of the room oh-so-slowly, halting for a ludicrous amount of time at the door, giving her a chance to change her mind.
"'Night, Castle," she says, softly, as he's standing there in the doorway.
"'Till tomorrow, Beckett," he responds, finally leaving the room.
As he wanders aimlessly toward his office, he thinks that it was completely insane for him to assume that, in any situation short of a coma (or being half asleep and traumatized after a hideous nightmare), she would allow him to share a bed with her. But she had been so nice, ever since earlier that afternoon when Alexis had led him out of his office and towards the kitchen, announcing to his mother and Beckett, "Dad and Gina broke up. We're going to eat ice cream now. Everyone has to have some." Beckett had allowed them to feed her Ben & Jerry's; she'd lazed on the couch with them after grudgingly agreeing to watch Lesbian Vampire Killers ("It's British comedy horror," Castle had said, and she'd rolled her eyes but hadn't even made a comment); she'd sat in the kitchen while they cooked tandoori chicken; she'd eaten with them at the table, slouched in an overstuffed armchair that Castle had dragged over; and then, after Martha had gone back to Chet's, she'd played a rousing game of Monopoly in the living room with him and Alexis. The whole time, he'd had been a little quieter, a little more introverted, and Beckett had been softer, easier to persuade, quicker to smile at him. So he'd pushed his luck after she'd said she was going to bed, right after Alexis had meandered up to her room, and he'd followed her upstairs like a small, shaky puppy only to find that her patience did, in fact, still have limits.
He enters the office and sits down at his computer, stares at the screen, opens Outlook, closes Outlook, opens Firefox, closes Firefox, opens NepentheNikki3 (the original plot had hinged upon a once-depressed amnesiac, and while he's long-since scrapped that, the working title remains unchanged), closes NepentheNikki3, and finally slams the laptop shut, walks to his room, changes, and lies in bed, staring at his ceiling, trying not to twitch or thrash from side to side like a small, petulant child.
Half an hour later, he's leapt to his feet at a creaking floorboard, at the sound of a horn honking, and, most recently, at some kind of aircraft noise, his brain screaming Beckett and launching him out of bed, heart palpitating. Still on his feet from the aircraft scare, his chest pounding, he grabs his pillow and his comforter and trudges to the doorway of the spare room, stopping just outside. Too frayed to think about how ridiculous he looks, he lumbers down onto the floor, wraps himself in the duvet, lays his head back on the pillow, and falls asleep almost immediately, content that, out of all the things he can't control, he will at least be able to hear if Beckett needs him.
When he wakes again it's suddenly bright and his calf hurts. He squints his eyes open to see his daughter staring at him with a look that is part pity, part disbelief. She's vigorously rubbing her foot, which she must have jammed into his leg. Her other hand rests on the light switch.
"Dad, really? Why?" she asks groggily.
"Why are you wandering the house in the middle of the night?" he responds, using his best accusatory whisper.
"Scratchy throat," she says quietly, arching an eyebrow at him. "I wanted juice."
He rubs his eyes and props himself up on his elbows. "Are you getting sick?"
"No, Dad, I think it's just the dry air, and stop changing the subject. I'm not the one that deserves to be interrogated here."
"A lot of doctors say that sleeping on the floor is really good for your back."
She blinks at him. "What do you think Detective Beckett would do if she opened her door and found you sleeping out here?"
"Club me to death with a crutch," he says decisively. "That's why we should keep our voices looooow."
She shakes her head slowly. "It's – it's a little bit sad, Dad." She pauses, tilts her head. "And extremely stalkerish."
"Alexis, if I teach you nothing else, let it be that sometimes we must obsessively stalk the people we love when they really need it."
"Very wise," she says, patronizing, and then tilts her head some more. "Do you actually love her? I mean, I know you love her, but do you – you know?"
He freezes, still propped on his elbows, because Are you in love with Beckett? is a very different question from Do you love Beckett? or Would you like to have unrestrained, wild sex with Beckett? Although he knows the answers to the last two questions instinctively (he's known he wanted her clothes off since the very first time he turned around and saw her lithe arm holding a tin shield, and he's known he loved her in some way for a long time, probably since she told him about her mother's murder), he has somehow never mulled over the first, which is possibly why it was so easy for him to fall back into a relationship with Gina over the summer.
She watches him, and he can tell she's analyzing his idiotic, dumbfounded expression. She finally walks over, crouches next to him, and ruffles his hair. "Never mind, Dad. I'm going to go get some juice. You're an excellent stalker."
She pads away to the kitchen, and she's gone for several minutes, but he's still frozen on his elbows when she heads back to her room. "You want me to leave the hallway light on or turn it off?" she whispers, apparently deciding to ignore her father's descent into insanity.
"Dunno," he mumbles.
She surveys his setup. "It's less pathetic in the dark," she says decisively, and flicks off the switch before heading back to her room.
He doesn't go back to sleep. He flops back down onto his back and stares numbly into the darkness. Usually, his brain is in overdrive: he's always thinking of new plotlines for a novel or alternative theories about who committed a murder or new and exciting ways to have fun, but it's like the past two days and his conversation with Alexis have anesthetized his brain. He can't think; he can only lie there, torpidly gazing in the direction of Beckett's door.
Because he's still up and staring in that direction, he can see the sudden strip of light appear from the bottom of her doorway, and because he's still only firing on three or four neurons, he doesn't consider potential death or privacy issues. He just shoves himself to his feet, raps twice on the door, and, without waiting for a response, pushes it open and walks into the room.
Beckett's nightstand lamp casts shadows around the room, and it's worse, somehow, than if all the lights were on, to see her sitting up in bed, the dimness only half illuminating the tears streaked down her face. She's busy wiping them away with the arm of her long-sleeve shirt that she's pulled over her wrist, but she freezes as he walks into the room, watching him in wary shock.
"Bad dream?" he asks gruffly, idiotically, standing gawkily in the doorway.
"Castle, please go away," she says, voice strained and scratchy.
"I think I'm in love with you," he says candidly, the filter between his brain and his mouth irretrievably lost. "I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm in love with you." He pauses, tilts his head. "No, no, I'm in love with you, just that. Do over - pretend that's all I've said. I'm in love with you."
Beckett buries her teary face in her sleeve-covered hands and groans, loudly.
Keep talking, his anesthetized brain conveys, keep talking or God only knows what will happen. The words tumble out of him in a rush. "It doesn't really change anything. I kind of just realized it, thanks to Alexis, go figure, and I've known I've loved you for approximately forever, but I think I've actually been in love with you for a while, too, even if I wasn't all the way aware. So you don't have to feel awkward or weird, because it wasn't awkward or weird before now. Please don't feel awkward or weird."
"Why are you doing this?" she moans into her hands.
"I was sleeping on the floor outside your room," he confesses, because he has apparently lost all of his filters and his common sense and his will to live tonight. "I couldn't sleep anywhere else, but I could sleep on the floor outside your room."
She finally peers over her hands with red-rimmed eyes. "Are you drunk?" He shakes his head no, just once. "High?" He shakes his head again. "Hopped up on meth? Hallucinating? Having a stroke?" He keeps shaking his head.
"I promise," he says, hoping his sincerity leeches into his voice.
She shakes her head, scrubs her eyes with the sleeve-covered heels of her hands. "I can't – God Castle, whatever you want, I just can't –" she breaks off, looking lost.
"You don't have to do anything," he says firmly. "You can't think I came in here to –" he pauses, collecting himself, and finally gets a grip on his runaway mouth. "I will do anything for you. Including continually harass you even though you keep telling me to go away because I'm not sure that going away is what you really need. But if you tell me to leave now, I will leave."
Her lips part, and he braces himself. But then her bloodshot eyes flick over him, and he must look like an absolute wreck, because her chest rises and falls in a huge sigh, and she leans over and pushes back the covers on the other side of the bed. "Only so you're not sleeping on the floor," she says, her voice still clogged and nasal.
"Your concern for my spine is touching," he responds as he walks toward the bed as quickly as he can without jogging. He has no desire to give her any time to reconsider.
"You're slow enough as it is," Beckett retorts softly as he slides under the covers. "If you keep torturing your back now, your 60-year-old self won't stand a chance of keeping up."
His breath catches, because there she is, lying under the same covers as him and referring to them, together, in twenty years, which is closer to an I love you, too than he'd honestly ever expected from Beckett. He shifts slightly, stretches out and rests a hand in the space between them in the middle of the bed. His heart stumbles a beat when she reaches out and silently laces her fingers through his.
X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X
Thank you to everyone out there reading and reviewing. This story is already way longer than I'd anticipated (well, okay, so I hadn't so much thought about an actual length when I began writing, but if I had, I probably would have thought of it being shorter), but I'm having a stupid amount of fun thanks to the virtual audience!