Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.
She's trying to block out Castle's side of the call, which consists largely of "mmhmm," "huh," and "sorry, man." She's distracted, anyway, by what he'd said to her just before Slaughter called.
"What about other important things, Beckett? You remember all of them?" He's so hurt and mad, and those two questions are like the lashes of a whip. For the last couple of weeks she's been trying to figure out what had gone wrong; every time she thinks she's close, she's not. Was it this? No. Could it have been that? No. What about the other thing? No.
"Beckett? Beckett?"
Castle's looking at her as if she were a stranger doing strange things. "Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about something. Sorry." She signals the waitress for more coffee. If she could just freeze-frame everything for a few minutes so she could concentrate on this. She's on to something at last, she knows. Castle would call it spidey senses; she calls it finally using her training as a detective. There's a virtual white board in her mind, and she's mentally filling in a timeline, putting up photos of persons of interest, suspects. There's a good, bad, chance, that she's Suspect Numero Uno. "So, Slaughter, huh?"
"Yeah."
The waitress is refilling their mugs, and Beckett waits for her to retreat. "You have to go meet him?"
"Not yet. He's going to the dentist."
Not much about Slaughter can surprise her any more, but that does, and her voice gives her away. "In the middle of a homicide investigation?"
"Emergency visit. Seems he tripped, slipped, something, after we left the—. When he was on his way home. He fell. Hurt a tooth. Teeth, actually."
"Got into a fight with the sidewalk and the sidewalk won?"
"Curb. The curb won."
"They can be tricky little devils, those curbs. My father had that happen a couple of times, back in the day. Before." She unconsciously runs her finger across the face of her watch. "His teeth were okay, luckily."
Castle grimaces. "I don't think it's the first time for Slaughter. Ever notice those caps? I'm guessing he lost a couple of teeth in falls. Or brawls."
She looks evenly at him. There's definitely a chink in the armor: for whatever reason, he's not as dazzled by The Widowmaker as he had been. Still, she has to be careful. "Well, since you have some time, maybe we could put it to good use and work on the case. Gates gave me the files." She hoists her bag and points.
"What, here?"
"No, not here. A little too public for that. We can't do it at the precinct in case Slaughter pops in and sees us. But we could use my apartment, my living room, could spread everything out there." She swallows hard. "If that doesn't make you uncomfortable." Oh, shit, he looks angry again.
"Why would that make me uncomfortable, Beckett?"
"I don't know, just. Listen," she tries to sound upbeat. "All this coffee, you know? I have to go to the ladies room. Be right back." She's got a bladder of steel, but she needs a few moments away from him and that was the only thing she could come up with in her state.
She stands just inside the door of the cafe's tiny rest room and goes over the timeline she'd been constructing in her brain. And then it happens, as so many awful realizations do. Maybe it was using coffee as an excuse to come in here, but something jarred everything loose. Coffee. The coffee he's been bringing her every day almost from the beginning. The paper cup with the plastic lid. Her legs feel so weak that she grabs the edge of the sink for support. In her mind, she's back in the bullpen, five months ago, and sees him at her desk. It's the end of the sniper case. She's been such a mess, and Castle has been so understanding. More than understanding, he's been kind. Really, truly, amazingly kind. With excruciating clarity, she recalls every second of that scene.
He says that he's been waiting for his partner. "Maybe you've seen her. Pretty girl, thinks she can leap tall buildings in a single bound, carries the weight of the world on her shoulders, yet still manages to laugh at some of my jokes."
"She sounds like a handful," she says.
"Tell me about it." He smiles. "Anyway, If you do see her, tell her she owes me about a hundred coffees." After that, he goes home.
She glances at her reflection in the mirror over the sink, and turns her head away. Coffee. The Boylan Plaza bombing. Two weeks ago. She'd been grilling Bobby Lopez, hard. When she'd come out of the box and gone back to her desk, she'd found a cup of coffee waiting. She'd asked Espo if Castle was there and he responded that he had been but then said that he had to leave. Coffee. She owes him way more than a hundred coffees.
It's a cannonball to her gut. Another bullet embedded in her heart. A 500-pound wrecking ball against the side of her head. Castle had heard her tell Bobby Lopez that she remembered everything about her shooting. No wonder he'd taken off. No wonder he'd—. Fucking hell. That's why Jacinda. That's why Slaughter. She has just enough strength to walk two steps and throw up in the toilet.
Castle stares at the doughnut. It really is his favorite, and though he has zero appetite, the sugar will be good for him. He should have dumped a few teaspoons in his coffee, too. Why is she being so nice? He tears off a piece of the yeasty confection and chews it contemplatively, or as contemplatively as he can with his head-splitting hangover. She acts as though she really wants to work with him, which is weird. She'd been pissed when he'd told her about the way he and Slaughter had taken down the two guys in a brawl. Said he was a writer, not a cop. Thanks for the reminder, Beckett. And she'd almost torn him a new one when he'd let Slaughter use the interrogation room at the Twelfth. Huh. Maybe she had a point. A minor one, but a point. He has another bite of doughnut. She'd been pissed, but she'd been protecting him. Slaughter is a freaking madman.
Where is she, anyway? He turns in the direction of the rest room and sees that the door is still shut. She must have been in there at least ten minutes. Longer, probably. He finishes the doughnut and checks his watch. Five more minutes have elapsed, and the place is filling up with the lunch crowd. He's worried now, and just about to get up and knock on the rest room door when it opens and she walks out, her face the color of his paper napkin. The absence of make-up makes her pallor unmissable.
"You all right, Beckett?" he asks as she sits opposite him again.
"Yeah. Thanks. Just need some water."
"You look like a ghost, if you don't mind my saying so. Or like you just saw one."
"I did," she mumbles against the rim of her glass.
She must assume that he hadn't heard her. He'll leave it. For now. He watches her drink half the glass and straighten up.
"You ate your doughnut. Good."
"Yeah, it was good."
"I meant I'm glad—."
"I know."
She opens her bag, takes a $10 bill from her wallet, and sets it down next to her spoon. "What do you say, Castle, shall we go solve a murder?"
He shrugs. "Sure. Why not. Won't be the first time."
She closes her eyes very briefly. Please, please don't let it be the last. "No, it won't."
"You got a murder board at your place?" The instant he says it he wants to stuff it back in his mouth. What an idiot he is. Last year she had shown him the makeshift murder board of her mother's case, which she'd hidden on folding shutters in her apartment. It was right after Detective Raglan had been shot to death in front of them, while he was warming his hands on a mug of coffee and just beginning to confess his part in the death of Johanna Beckett. "Oh, God, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."
"It's okay," she says, the two syllables sounding like a bruise and making his heart contract. "I do, sort of. A couple of months ago I bought a small one at Staples. It's supposed to be a kitchen note board, but it helps me sort things out sometimes, when I get a loony idea in the middle of the night." They're on the sidewalk now, and she looks up and down MacDougal Street. "Did you drive?"
"No way. Took a cab."
"All right, then you can come in my car."
It's the quietest ride they've ever had. She's so shaken about her realization that Castle had heard her—. She doesn't know how to broach it. They're both floundering in this terra incognita, and it's terrifying. She hates it. But what's most important now is protecting Castle from Slaughter. The rest will have to wait.
Neither one says a word until they're inside her apartment. Once they lay out a few papers on her table, and begin making notes on her white board that's propped up on a small easel by a window, the ease begins to return. With suggestions and counter-proposals and some minor differences of opinion, they're inching back into familiar territory, or at least its outskirts.
"You know," he says, waving a short stack of paper, "reading about this scum Cesar Vales makes me hungry for Tex-Mex."
"Reading about the upstanding Michael Reilly doesn't make you hungry for corned beef and cabbage? How about the model citizen Malik Williams? He give you a hankering for curried goat?"
"Please, stop." He puts up his hands and grins. "May I remind you of my hangover?"
"Are you telling me that fajita burritos go down well with a hangover?"
"Now that you say it out loud, no. Forget it."
"I'm not really hungry either." She stands up too quickly, and feels light-headed. "I could use some coffee, though."
"You could always use some coffee, Beckett. It's your life's blood."
Her life's blood. Between them, yes. But her life's blood is also what was flowing out of her last May, through a hole in her dress blues and onto the green grass, seeping into the brown earth below, while he told her that he loved her. She wants to stand up for this. It's important. "You called me Kate."
What is she talking about? "I did?"
"You called me Kate, Castle. In the cemetery. I never told you that I remembered and I finally figured out, while we were in the cafe today, why you've been so angry with me lately. Pathetic that an NYPD detective couldn't do it sooner, isn't it? You heard me when I was questioning Bobby Lopez. I'm sorry."
He gets up from the chair he'd been perched on, but rather than move closer to her, he backs away, as all his rage and disappointment flood back in. "You're sorry? Eleven months later and you're fucking sorry? That's it?"
"No, that's not it. I want to explain, please."
"Explain what? What's there to explain? You heard me or you didn't hear me. That requires no explanation. At all. And especially almost a year later. And you know what really stings? That that little jerk learned it before I did."
"It wasn't almost a year." She's not thinking fast enough. She has to make him understand.
"It's April. I said it last May. That's almost a year. I don't know why I'm explaining that, since it doesn't really matter now."
She's pleading. "It does matter, Castle. It does. I know you said it almost a year ago, but it was the end of summer before I was sure that you had. I'd been too doped up, in too much pain, too terrified. But I should have told you then."
"Damn right you should have."
"I should have told you, and then I should have asked you."
"Asked me? Asked me what?"
"If you still loved me."
"Is this a joke to you?"
"A joke? Do I look like I'm kidding, Castle?" She grabs her hair with both hands and pulls, hard. "You never said it again. I didn't know it you'd just said it in the heat of the moment. So I could die, I don't know, feeling loved."
"Why the hell didn't you say something?"
"Why didn't you?"
TBC
A/N Thank you very much, one and all. Have a great weekend. I haven't forgotten the kiss, I promise.