Disclaimer: What I wouldn't give...
What If…?
Chapter 9: Fear Is Never Reason Enough
They stop by the loft to pack a bag for Castle, just some clothes and toiletries, his laptop and a bottle of painkillers. Kate insists they need a change of scene when he tries to persuade her to stay there. But Alexis is due home sometime soon, and so he acquiesces, sensing that she maybe needs her own things around her to help deal with the shock and upset of the morning's events, not to mention the seismic shift in their relationship; caring for her needs the best way to let her care for him.
At a grocery store a few blocks from her apartment, they pick up a few basic essentials to restock her empty refrigerator, both of them too tired to speak or do much more than brush shoulders while they wait in line to pay; exchange tentative, curious glances until the lights turn green at her corner; tangle fingers when they enter her building; hold hands as they ride the elevator to her floor.
Everything building, building, building between them.
"I'll turn the heat on," says Kate tiredly, dropping her keys into a decorative bowl by her front door that Castle realizes he's never noticed before.
But then there are a lot of things in her apartment - her home - that he hasn't seen or noticed before, since this is the first time he has come here without a case to worry or distract them, and not as her partner or co-worker, not even as her friend, but as her lover, her boyfriend, and that realization makes his blood sing like never before.
The energy zinging through his body at the boundless possibilities that now lie before them for a life together sends his blood pressure rising and causes his head to hurt even more. He knows he's getting ahead of himself as usual, since they have talked through none of this. But he doesn't care, because last night changed everything for them, and it's pretty much all down to Kate, which is by far the best way this could have happened.
She takes his bag into the bedroom, but he hesitates to follow, since he's never made it that far before and she hasn't expressly invited him in this time either.
He knows she feels guilty about what happened today, that it's eating at her, from the silence she's been maintaining since they got into her car. And though he wants to reassure her, he knows from past experience that space and silence are her best routes out of this. She will eventually head back towards the light.
So he stands in her living room just looking around, fresh eyes dancing over everything; searching for new clues to the woman he loves, needing to know as much of this private side to her as he can get his hands on now that he is in her personal space, now that they are fully in each other's lives.
"Castle?" she calls from inside her bedroom, her voice slightly muffled by distance and the wall that divides them. "You okay out there?"
He hurries to the door, nursing his head in his hand since every quick or jerky movement makes his poor throbbing brain throb even harder.
"Right here," he says quietly, poking his head around the doorframe.
"Hey," she smiles shyly, almost as if she missed him in the minute and a half they've been apart.
"So…don't just stand there. Come on in. Make yourself at home," she tells him kindly, opening a drawer and clearing out a few piles of soft, feminine-looking garments to make space for his things.
He briefly wonders how long she thinks he's going to be staying, and then he realizes that he doesn't care if he gets to be with her and she's making room for him in her life. He'll take whatever he can get, whatever she can give.
She leaves his bag open on the floor at the foot of the bed for him to unpack.
He watches her move quickly and efficiently around her own space, opening another drawer to take out fresh underwear, fetching a sweatshirt and yoga pants from her closet. She goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower, and he hears the thundering roar as water strikes porcelain and then evens out.
When she comes back out, stripping Alexis' shirt over her head, he is sitting on the bottom of her bed, unable to move, other than to track her with weary eyes.
She pauses on the threshold with the shirt in her hands, the faint pink blush of the red wine stain still visible on the cup of her white bra; a small reminder, a milestone on their route to here.
"Do you feel okay?" she asks, coming straight for him, sitting down by his side without any thought to modesty or anything else. "No nausea or dizziness?" she asks, palming the back of his neck, a glimmer of panic in the quickening of her voice, her moments.
"Honestly?" he asks, as if seeking her permission.
"I think that might be best from now on, don't you?" she says, gently bumping his shoulder, trying hard to smile.
And how can something he's waited years to hear hurt so much, when he knows that honesty is something she has withheld from him, is still withholding?
"I…I'm having a hard time with this," he tells her, candor spilling out onto the floor in front of them like a real, solid, messy entity.
"I see," replies Kate carefully, actually having no idea where he's going with this, other than that she asked for it, so she'll have to hear it. No running now.
"Mmm. Being here…with you…it's a lot more than I hoped for when you agreed to watch a couple of John Woo movies with me. So…" he stops to look at her, then sighs, letting his eyes drift closed for a second, not making himself clear through the muddy waters of his aching head.
"Good more, I hope?" asks Kate, dropping a hand to his knee. "Since I kind of got you into this mess," she adds, tenderly touching the side of his head, fingers gently skirting the outer limits of the purpling bruise.
He doesn't pull away, in fact he finds himself leaning into her cool touch.
"Great more. Amazing more. Just…"
"Then, sounds okay to me," she replies quietly, patting his leg. "I'm going to take a shower," she says, standing stiffly, dirt from the basement floor still staining the knees of her pants where she knelt beside him trying to bring him round, holding his hand for everyone to see, a fact he still can't quite get over.
But he can make out the tightness in her features; the twin warriors - worry and guilt - crossing swords on the normally smooth plane of her brow as she tries to hold herself together, to keep everything she's not ready to face inside.
She doesn't invite him to join her in the shower this time, and he knows her well enough not to push, even if this new situation opens them up to asking for more from one another. Even if she told him to expect more of her. He won't. Not this time.
He lies back on her bed, sinking into the soft down of her comforter, imagining he can smell her all around him, suddenly overrun by exhaustion, needing to close his eyes just for a moment to alleviate the relentless throbbing in his head.
He instantly drifts off into a nightmare where they're cornered by a pack of snarling dogs, only this time there is no chain to hold them at bay, and then they're running across a field with the bloodthirsty hounds in hot pursuit. When Kate stumbles and falls in the dirt he has to stop to help her up, the dogs coming ever closer, rabid hunger in their red-hot eyes.
The sound of a choked sob brings him out of his doze. He thinks he's still dreaming at first, but the Kate in his dream was running with him, holding his hand and laughing as they made their escape over the endless span of an ornate, wooden rope bridge.
Kate, in reality, sounds as if she's having a breakdown in her shower, and, for the first time today, he is at a loss; his excitement temporarily doused in the face of this new challenge.
He knows how fiercely she guards her privacy, how she hates to have any kind of weakness witnessed, but he suspects this might be at least partly about him, and if they're doing this together, he has to make her see that letting him in is letting him care for her. Not an unwanted intrusion or a bid to know for the sake of knowing or a way to satisfy his writer's curiosity. And certainly not a sign of weakness.
He's here to stay, he wants to help, he needs this chance to love her to repair all the hurt that's gone before, all the wasted time spent apart.
He knocks lightly on the bathroom door. She left it half-ajar and that's almost permission enough. Steam curls out of the shower-warmed room, the sound of running water doing little to muffle her tears.
"Kate? Can I come in?" he asks hesitantly, stepping inside anyway and closing the door behind him.
She stops crying instantly, and he hates that she feels she has to control herself in front of him, hide her feelings away, be strong.
Always the strong one.
He picks up a towel from the shelf and bumps the shower curtain aside, then he leans past the spot where she's standing, elbows hugging her body, shaking and wet, her hands covering her face as she heaves, and he shuts off the faucet, soaking his forearm, his sleeve and part of his shirt in the process.
He strips the wet shirt over his head and drops it to the floor. Then he holds the towel out for her, nudging her hip with his knuckles to get her attention. When she doesn't react, he wraps it around her himself, and then easily lifts her out of the tub, sinking to the floor with her in his arms, until she is sitting in his lap like a child; an exhausted, half-drowned, bundle of warm Kate and fluffy, scented terry-cloth.
"Hey, hey, hey," he sings quietly to distract her. "Big day. Hmm? No sleep," he whispers, wrapping her up tighter in the towel. "It's okay to feel overwhelmed, Kate."
She leans into him, her body soft and pliant, burying her damp face in his neck, arms still wound tightly around her own torso; protecting, containing, trying to keep everything inside.
He can barely get his head around the fact that just twenty-four hours ago this would have been an impossibility: being allowed to hold her like this, to comfort her, having her reveal how deeply she cares about him; how badly all of this matters. A line they wouldn't have dared to cross.
"I'm screwing this up already," she hiccups, her lips brushing against his throat.
"Now how'd you figure that?" he asks patiently, bending his head down to look at her, tipping her face up until he can see her eyes.
"Look at us. I could have got you killed this morning. And I'm supposed to be looking after you right now. But here you are again…" she trails off, her chest hitching with another sob, and she reaches up to touch his chin.
"Exactly. Here I am," he soothes, kissing her forehead, rocking her until the motion gets to be too much for his poor head. "And here is where I'll always be, Kate. If you'll let me? Here is where I've wanted to be for a very long time."
She curls further into him after that, her damp body soaking through the towel and into the fabric of his pants, legs a long naked sprawl over his.
"This is how it's going to be, isn't it?" she asks plaintively.
"I don't understand. How what's going to be?"
"Scared of loving. But even more scared of losing."
"There's no need to be scared of either. The risks will always be there, no doubt. But…I promise you, Kate, if we open ourselves up to this, it'll be worth it. Everyone faces risks everyday. We're no different. But we are better together than apart, I can tell you that."
She watches his face as he reassures her, as if she needs to believe every single word he says to survive. Her eyes dart from his eyes to his mouth and then circle all of him again, as if she's memorizing his face or really looking properly at him for the first time.
"We have to talk. I need to talk. There's so much…" she breaks off breathlessly to kiss him hard.
He can feel her heart hammering against his bare skin. Her arms escape the confines of the towel and wrap around his neck so that she's clinging to him, while her mouth works feverishly over his; nipping, sucking, feeding on him. The suddenness of her assault startles him, the depth of her need stokes his, and he feels his body responding to her in ways he knows he shouldn't right now; in ways that are inappropriate.
She breaks away from his mouth to kiss his naked chest, the towel dropping to crumple around her waist in the process. And it's painful to witness and be a part of; this desperate unleashing of yearning and grief for every time they came close to losing one another and couldn't make it better by being this open, this exposed, this honest about how much they mean to one another.
He gentles her, slows her down eventually, with murmured words and light touches.
"Shhh, it's okay. I'm right here. Slow down. Slow down, Kate. Take it easy. Breathe."
She finally stops, her breathing ragged, to look into his eyes, need and fear and raw emotion swirling in the gold flecks of her irises, the color as beautiful, unique and complex as she is.
"Mmm," she hums on repeat, like a child self-soothing after a crying jag.
"Hey, we have all day and all night. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere," he repeats, running his fingers through her damp hair, desperately holding himself back from pressing his nose into her scalp to breath in the innate essence of her, in a bid to avoid confusing things further.
"I know," she blinks, trying to find some solid ground, some self-control. "I know. I'm sorry."
When he tries to move, she whispers, "Don't leave me, please? I need you, Castle."
And his heart feels so broken, and yet mended in one fell swoop, with the release of these words into this warm room.
"You only had to ask," he whispers back, kissing her temple, as she raises her eyes to his, grateful, relieved. "You only ever had to ask. Kate."
He manages to get them both off the bathroom floor and into the bedroom. Kate dresses herself, but she's quieter now, even than before.
Castle throws on a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt, keeping a watchful eye on her as he does so, and then he stores the rest of his clothes into the drawer space she's made for him. His shoulder hurts from when he fell awkwardly in the basement, and lifting her out of the tub and up off the floor hasn't helped any, though he'd never tell her that.
The sexiest woman he's ever been with, he thinks ruefully, watching dry-mouthed as she shimmies expertly into the tightest pair of black yoga pants he's ever seen, and he manages to get himself knocked out cold less than two hours later. What a chump.
While he's unpacking his toiletries in her bathroom – his toothbrush kissing hers, his razor on her glass shelf, shaving gel next to an elegant bottle of her perfume - he realizes how much he's missed this: being part of a couple; an 'us'. And it feels good with her, healthy, grown-up. Not claustrophobic like it did with Gina eventually, or exciting but manic like it did with Meredith.
He also realizes how lonely he's been, how starved of real female company that wasn't his eccentric mother or his all too-knowing daughter. He wonders if she's been lonely too, existing in this relationship limbo they've been enduring. He resolves to ask her sometime, once things settle down.
"We should eat something," she says, hanging on the doorframe, watching him examine her stuff, amused when he flinches and stiffens as if she caught him doing something wrong.
He touches things.
"Eat? Sure. Want a hand?" he offers, putting her perfume bottle carefully back on the shelf, challenging her knowing grin with a steady gaze that is full of denial; like a puppy dog who ate a sock.
"You need to rest," she says, wanting him close to her so very badly, but struggling to push the words out, not knowing how to ask without sounding clingy and desperate.
They're transitioning from subtext to honesty, and she's like a visitor to a foreign country who has her passport, but lost her translator crossing the border.
"Keep you company then?" he asks lightly, coming to her rescue like the true hero he is, without her even having to ask.
"So long as you stay out of my way," she fires back, smiling indulgently, playing this old role she knows so well: that of scolding partner, work-wife, maintaining control in all situations.
And she's so glad he lets her get away with this. Because she already broken down once in front of him today, and she's pretty sure it isn't going to be the last time, if this day takes the path she expects.
A/N: You kindly said you were up for more, and I seem to have gone and done my usual: opened a can of worms that wouldn't resolve in one chapter. So on we go…
Happy Castle Monday to those of you lucky enough to get to enjoy the show today, and to the rest of us, remember, 'Patience is a virtue. Possess it if you can. Seldom found in woman, never found in man!' Liv