Chapter 15 – The Endless Saturday

She has all day. A long, lazy Saturday stretching out before her, hours and hours to fill up with something or nothing before seven-thirty ticks around bearing Richard Castle to her front door.

Hours.

Twelve hours and twenty-four minutes to be precise. Never has a Saturday seemed so huge before, so long.

Never.

She spends a lot of time alone when she's not at work, through choice she has to admit. In the beginning, after her mother died, time alone was the simplest, indeed the only choice, since it meant no act was required from her: no forced smile to make those around her feel better, no chipper cheeriness or even a stirring from the mute prison she'd retreated to inside her own head, dredging up a few mundane words that would serve to assure people that their vigilance over her was now unwarranted, that the worst had passed, that she had reentered the human race and was now a functioning member once more.

Her time alone nowadays, since she graduated the Academy, has slipped into habit, a preference for quiet when her workday entails being all eyes and ears at once, barked commands, pat-downs that are surly at best and so often fraught: curse words, dirty, sexually denigrating talk and the edge of danger never far away. The whooping of sirens, the chatter of her partner a constant beside her for eight and a half hours on tour, interruptions from Central Dispatch on the radio the breadcrumbs that shape their route for the day. Like a tortoise she yearns to retreat inside her shell and shut the noise off, breath, think, decompress as soon as she is alone.

So she loves the luxury of silence, the cool dimness of her apartment, hours with nothing to do, no orders or shape or timescale to her day. Except today. Today the silence and the shapelessness of the hours until dinner slightly scare her. They offer too much time to think, too many minutes to cross off with terrifyingly intimate scenarios playing on a loop inside her head. She's going to dinner with a man she arrested not that long ago, a man who has stalked and pursued her, aided and abetted by her own sergeant no less. She's going to dinner with a national celebrity author, one of New York City's most desirable bachelors. She must be crazy.

So she eschews a shower in favor of a run, donning a second skin of black and purple Lycra along with her Nike's. She grabs her keys and phone, straps her iPod to her arm and takes off down the stairs feeling pumped with adrenalin and nerves before she even leaves her apartment. She has so much excess energy to burn off, so many empty hours to fill.

She runs south down 2nd Avenue until she reaches St. Marks Place, where she pauses to catch her breath outside a Japanese noodle bar. She leaves the fragrant joint with a small to-go bowl of spicy miso ramen that'll keep her going until dinner and a healthy juice mix of carrot, ginger and celery which she walks a couple of blocks to Tompkins Square Park to eat. She settles on a bench outside the basketball courts where a hard-fought pick-up game between what sounds like a small group of friends and some random strangers is underway. A mere two hours have gone by since she last checked her dad's watch, so she cranks up her iPod, digs into her lunch and attempts to regulate her breathing in time with the yells on the asphalt court beyond the chain link fence in front of her.

Meanwhile, over in SoHo…

"Alexis, please. Just find a pair of shoes and put them on, honey," Castle cajoles his daughter, glancing at his watch to keep track of the time. He's grimacing on the inside, he hopes, screening his rising frustration from his unusually recalcitrant child.

"Why can't I come?" she demands, stomping her right foot in a gesture so uncharacteristic he's sure she must have learned it from someone else.

"Because this dinner is for grown-ups, pumpkin. You can have dinner with Kate another time, okay?"

"Caitlin has dinner with Gary and her mom all the time," she argues back, her little cheeks reddening with fury to match the fire of her hair.

Castle suppresses any visible reaction, managing to deal with this ah-ha moment internally. But this little nugget explains the out-of-character foot stomping and the stroppy attitude: she's been drawing parallels between Jill and Gary and Kate and himself.

He crouches down in front of Alexis, removing a sparkly pink ballet slipper from her hand and dropping it to the floor so that he can take both of her tiny hands in his. He tugs on them to get her attention.

"Baby, Caitlin's mom has known Gary for a long time. And they live together now. Kate and I just met a few weeks ago. We haven't even been out for dinner yet. But I promise that the three of us can go out somewhere together."

"Soon?" she whines, uncertainly.

Castle nods, slightly nervous to be offering this "dine with a bona fide NYPD cop" experience to his daughter without Kate's agreement or permission. But he needs her to get her things packed so that she can go and stay at the Henry's overnight. His mother really dropped him in it when she informed him late in the day that her plans had changed, that she would need this weekend free to…well, he hardly wants to think about the details. She'll be out of town is all he really needed to know, and therefore unavailable to take care of her granddaughter. He feels slightly guilty palming Alexis off on yet another set of friends, but he doesn't want to curb this evening with Kate by having to work around bedtime stories and teeth-cleaning duties. Alexis loves sleeping over with twins Jack and Phoebe Henry, so there shouldn't be any problem. He just has to get her packed up so the rest of his day can unfold as planned, after he drops her off at ballet class.

"Look, why don't you take the Lilo & Stitch backpack? Then you can fit in an extra pair of shoes?" he suggests, trying to sound reasonable and productive. If Alexis senses that she's being rushed, patronized, managed or coddled, she'll only make things harder on both of them.

"What about my cape and wand? Everything won't fit."

"Go dressed as Harry then. Wear your cape over your dress."

Alexis stares at him like he's suddenly grown an extra head. She lands her hands on her hips and gives him an all-out glare. "I can't go half Hermione and half Harry."

"Hmm, that would make you Har-mione," he suggests, hoping to raise a smile.

He gets an eye-roll instead, followed by another impatient glare as she kicks out one hip to indicate that she's not impressed and she's still waiting for a solution. How did she get so old so fast, he wonders, watching this terrifying range of female gestures take place in front of him?

Castle takes a breath, bites his tongue, and then he smiles, all reason. "Then you have to decide who you want to be today. Smart girl wizard or the guy with the scar?"

She thinks for a second and then she answers with such confidence it rocks Castle back on his feet. "I think Kate would choose the scar. Don't you? I'm going with Harry. Where are my dark pants?" she lisps, turning in a circle to survey the explosion of small clothes littering her bed.

They lock the front door half an hour later rolling a small, pink, wheeled case behind them in place of the Lilo & Stitch backpack. You'd think she was leaving home for a week instead of just one night, but Castle lets it slide for once in favor of a happy child and an easier life.

Back at her apartment, Kate has her own small clothing explosion taking place in her bedroom. She cleaned the bathroom, changed her bed linen, and then began dragging all manner of outfit combos out of her closet and drawers, studying pairings in the mirror, before rejecting, editing and reworking. She's now sitting half-naked on her bedroom floor trying to reattached a button to the pants she's decided are essential to tonight's outfit. Forget the fact that she has several other pairs of equally well-cut, relatively new, equivalently expensive pants and jeans in perfect condition that she could wear tonight. It's the law of the female psyche that the unavailable pants – the ones missing a button, minus a working zipper, the pants with the hem descending around one ankle or the nasty stain on one thigh – those are the pants a woman will decide she desperately needs for a night out, when time is of the essence, dry cleaners and tailors are closed and decisions have to be made.

So she sews. And then she curses when she pricks her finger with the needle while finishing off with a double loop through the back of the garment to secure the end of the thread. She sucks on her finger like a child and then she stares at her bedside clock in alarm.

It's 6.45pm already! Where did the day go? Rick will be here in forty-five freaking minutes!

She runs to the bathroom to throw herself into the shower, almost slipping and falling as she hurries to step out on to the cold tile without the aid of a bathmat five minutes later.

Her make-up routine is minimal, even for dates, so she's presentable by 7.10pm. A quick blast of the hairdryer, a scoop of gel and a tousle through with her fingers and her short, textured style is ready to go. She dresses more carefully, attempting to calm the freneticism of the last twenty-five minutes with some quiet time. Her jeans fit like a soft leather glove, now with working button. She adds a sheer purple shirt with a black cami underneath and a pair of black high-heel ankle boots. Tiny gold earrings and a thin gold chain with a gold disk pendant that bears her initial in curling cursive finish her outfit. Purple and gold are such regal colors they work well together, sparking off her eyes and her hair.

By the time she's finished dressing, packing necessities into her small purse, and adding a final coat of cherry flavored lipgloss, it's already 7.25pm. She's nervous - tingling with the kind of excitement that swings between being unpleasantly anxious and perfectly anticipatory. Despite her focus on deep breathing she gets a sense of something else, some kind of awareness that leads her to her own front door to peer through the spyhole. There on the other side of the door, pacing back and forth on catlike feet she would never have suspected him of possessing, is Rick Castle. And he's talking to himself.

Suddenly her nerves diminish, like a rolling boil in a stovetop pot reduced to a simmer. His nervousness is plain to see as she watches him wear a path up and down the hallway of her building. She smiles to herself and then she bites her lip. She's still debating her course of action when he abruptly turns to face her door, following a lightening quick check of the time on his watch. But she's so engrossed in studying him that she doesn't pull away quickly enough, and she knows in a heartbeat that as she does so the light level through the peephole will change, and if he's anywhere as observant as she knows him to be, she will be busted.

"Kate? You…you there?" he calls from the other side of her sturdy front door.

She sighs and slaps a hand to her forehead. Yep, busted!

"Uh…yeah, just coming," she calls in response, turning in a circle, gritting her teeth and giving her hair a final fluff before she turns the deadbolt with a flick of her wrist and prepares to face the music.

"Hi," grins Castle, evidently feeling equally as caught out, which kind of works in Kate's favor.

She decides to seize the upper hand. "Were you lurking outside my door, Mr. Castle?" she demands, tartly.

The writer tips his head to one side, a slightly bashful grin on his face. "I got here a little early. Didn't want to rush you," he explains. "So I was…pacing…quietly."

Just when Kate thinks she got away with her own spot of lurking, he adds, "If the shadow moving across your peephole is any indication, I wasn't the only one skulking around."

Kate can't help the grin that creeps onto her face. "Okay, you caught me. Must have heard something out in the hall. It's a cop thing," she adds by way of qualification. "But I swear I just looked out as you looked up."

Castle regards her for a second. "Are we even?"

Kate grins at the floor and then looks back up again, meeting his eyes. "Guess we are."

"Shall we step over this embarrassing start to the evening and admit that we are just two highly curious individuals? Which is definitely not a bad thing, especially in this city. Can't be too careful about who's loitering outside you door," he adds, giving her a wink.

"Highly curious," ponders Kate, before deciding to agree, "Yeah, I think I can live with that."

"Great," says Castle, suddenly feeling the urge to look at his shoes.

There's an awkward moment while they stand facing one another across the threshold of Kate's apartment, before she remembers her manners and he remembers the bottle of wine he has secreted behind his back.

"Would you like to come in?" clashes with "I know you said no flowers, so I thought I'd replenish your fridge."

"Yes, please," and "Thank you," bounce off one another in another display of near perfect timing, and Kate laughs, shaking her head while Castle adds, "I think we might have found ourselves a party trick."

"Mm, an unusual one at that," Kate agrees, before stepping back and holding out on arm in a gesture meant to indicate that he is now invited into her home.

Castle gives her one last confirming look and she nods for him to go ahead and enter. It's as if they've hit the reset button again and everything has been returned to the nerves of old, before they got comfortable chatting and laughing with one another on the phone.

"This is—" comes out at the same time as, "Did Alexis get—" and soon they're laughing again, breaking the ice with a round of, "After you," and, "No, ladies first. Please. I insist."

"Please, you're my guest, Rick. What were you going to say?"

He looks around her open plan living room-come-kitchen and offers up a smile. "Just that this is a really nice apartment."

Kate looks around too, in the same way that Castle did when she first visited the loft: attempting to see her own private space as he is seeing it now. All she sees is a small, though neat and tidy, apartment that is significantly less well endowed with features and quirky architectural detail than she would like. She shrugs, "It's warm in the winter, the plumbing and A/C both work, the rent is manageable and it's pretty convenient for work."

"I sense a but."

Kate looks around her at the off-white walls, the beige carpeted floor and the coffee and cream toned kitchen counter and cabinetry that could both do with being dragged out of the 70's.

"Yeah, I guess I just…it's not really my style. That's all. But this is Manhattan. I'm lucky to live in a rent stabilized building with a Super who actually fixes things the first time you ask."

"How long have you lived here?"

"I started renting this place when I entered the Academy, so…better part of three years."

"And…it's home?"

"Yes, it's definitely home now," she agrees, following Castle's eyes to the brown leather sleeper sofa and Tucson lift-top coffee table she went with her hungover dad to buy from Raymour & Flannigan on East 14th Street, feeling exactly what she was: a terrified college student on the cusp of being thrust into the role of grown-up well-before her time.

"I like your style," he says, wandering over to a cheap wooden bookcase standing against the back wall to lift one of a small parade of elephants taking pride of place on the middle shelf.

She watches him turn the artifact over in his large hands, carefully examining the painted porcelain figurine. It's too soon to admit that she inherited these cherished items from her dead mother. The elephants, as well as an engagement ring, and the stack of his books she carefully removed from the shelves before his arrival, storing them in her bedside cabinet out of sight. Too many questions and assumptions that way lie. So she's holding off until she gets a clearer sense of where, if anywhere, this friendship might be headed.

"So…do I get to know where we're going tonight?"

Castle carefully replaces the elephant on its shelf and turns to face her. "Soon. I promise."

She flicks her hand over her mid-section, giving him a querying look. "This appropriate attire?"

"Perfect. You…you really look lovely, Kate," he says with such sincerity than she finds it hard to reconcile this gentle, kind man with the arrogant fool she first met on the back of a borrowed police horse.

"Thank you. So do you," she adds, allowing herself a second or two to check him out.

He doesn't seem to mind. In fact, just a hint of the preening, Page Six-er reappears as he steps back to allow her room to look, does a twirl and then performs an elaborate bow worthy of swashbuckling Hollywood heartthrob Errol Flynn.

Kate laughs. "Okay, you look pretty good. Don't overdo it, Romeo."

"Too much?" he laughs, taking her ribbing with good humor.

"Just a little."

"Noted. Promise not to embarrass you when we're out in public."

A shot of excitement runs through her, reigniting some of her nerves at the thought of going out somewhere unknown with the well-known author.

"Hey," he says, reaching out to touch her arm, "don't look so terrified. Promise my table manners will pass muster. I'm even potty trained."

"Oh, jeez. Poor Alexis. I hope you don't say things like that in front of her friends?"

"I'm kid-trained too. Though from her performance this morning you'd never know it."

"Oh? Problem?"

"Just…" Castle shakes his head, unsure whether telling Kate about Alexis' little tantrum will freak her out. "It's nothing. Tell you later," he offers when she keeps looking at him quizzically, obviously sensing a story.

To put her off the scent, Castle glances at his watch. "We should really get going."

Kate regards him warily, unwilling to give up right away on whatever it is he's reluctant to share with her. Finally she breaks eye contact, finds her purse and the light summer jacket she selected earlier laid out on her lone armchair that sits catty corner to the sofa. "Are we going far?" she asks, as Castle gives her small apartment one more curious sweep before heading the few steps back towards the front door.

"Not too far," he assures her, though his tone seems deliberately vague.

He waits for her a little way down the hall while she locks her front door. He imagines Alexis one day living alone like Kate in some old apartment building in this big, sometimes unforgiving city and it makes him shiver, makes him long for today's innocent argument over sparkly ballet shoes and Harry Potter capes.

"You okay?" asks Kate once she draws level with him.

"Uh…yup," he nods, a tight smile quickly slipped in place for her lest he spills his guts and comes off sounding more like a neurotic dad leaving his newborn alone for the first time than the handsome guy going on a date with an attractive young woman he's been wooing for some time that he wants to appear to Kate.

The air down on the street in front of Kate's building is so pleasantly warm that they both seem to relax the second it wraps around them like a comforting blanket, permeating their clothing and caressing their skin.

Kate smiles at Castle expectantly, one hand on her purse and the other one tucked inside her jacket pocket as she waits for a steer from him. "So…which way?" she asks, glancing up and down the street.

"Do you like Japanese food?" he asks, startling a little when Kate lets out a surprise peel of laughter and vigorously nods her head. "Did I say something funny?"

She shakes her head, the short, spiky strands of her hair dancing prettily around her face. "No. Honestly. I love Japanese food."

Castle watches her like he's still not sure. "You're not just humoring me?"

Kate takes her hand out of her pocket and crosses her heart. "Swear."

"So…what's with the gales of laughter? Did I miss a joke?"

She chews her lip, toes the sidewalk and swings her shoulders from side to side like a little girl about to confess some minor crime. "I might have had a bowl of ramen noodles for lunch today," she admits, wincing as she peers up at him through her long, dark lashes.

Castle face falls instantly. "Oh, Kate. No, then we'll find a plan B for dinner."

But she reaches for his arm before she can think twice, wrapping her fingers around his wrist. "Honestly, I'd love nothing more than to go get more Japanese food with you tonight."

Castle eyes her suspiciously, the thrill of her honest declaration fizzing in his insides. "You sure?"

"I'm one hundred percent sure. I'm also pretty certain you don't have a plan B up your sleeve so…" She winks at him, squeezing his hand before letting him go. "Which way?"

Castle offers her a grateful smile. She is right: there was no plan B. When he had pressed her sergeant for tips as to what might make a good date night, the little Japanese restaurant a block from her apartment had been the definitive answer. No fancy, overpriced French food, no carriage rides around the Park and definitely no flowers had been Sergeant Halliday's stern, earnest advice. Castle had trusted her reluctantly, but it looked as if that trust might just pay off.

"One block over."

They head north, getting just a handful of steps up the street before Kate gasps, fingers grasping for Castle's sleeve. "Not Shuko?"

Castle allows a sly smile to creep over his face. "You know it?"

"It's my favorite."

"Really?" he asks in that gleeful, mock-surprised way people have when they already know the answer.

Kate slams to a dead halt. "Wait. This is no coincidence. Who told you?"

"I might have asked around."

"Who. Told. You?" she presses.

"Cathy."

Kate groans, one hand pressed to her forehead, covering her eyes. "Sergeant Halliday knows were we're going on our first date?"

Castle coughs uncomfortably, rubbing the back of his neck, before admitting, "Technically Sergeant Halliday chose our first date."

Kate looks like she might be sick as she turns in a little circle until her back is to him, needing a moment to process this new and alarming information.

Castle reaches out to touch her back, pulling his hand away at the last second in case she doesn't want to be touched, in case he messes things up anymore than he already has. "Are you okay? I just didn't want to screw up, take you to the wrong place, Kate. Tonight is important to me. I just wanted it to go well. Did Halliday give me a bad steer? You do like Japanese food, don't you?"

He sounds so fraught with doubt, so desperate for their date to go well that Kate can do nothing but forgive him for asking her boss for help on where they should go.

"She's never even been to my apartment. I have no idea how she even knows I like Japanese, let alone that Shuko is my favorite place in this neighborhood."

Kate isn't running, which is great, and to hear that the restaurant they're headed to is her favorite... Well, score two for Halliday.

"So…I didn't totally screw up?" Castle risks asking, hands clenched into fists inside his pants' pockets.

She finally turns to face him. "I'm asking your mother for baby photos after this. You do understand that, don't you? Baby photos and every little embarrassing story from your early childhood right through adolescence. And you've got to sit there and take the humiliation like a man. Understand?"

She's smiling by the time she finishes her list of demands and Castle nods contritely, secretly gleeful inside that she's giving him this chance, no matter how embarrassing her consultation with his mother might prove in time. He should have known better than to breach her privacy by asking Halliday for help. He's better than that. He's planned hundreds of dates over the years. It's just that when it comes to Kate Beckett, making the wrong move is no longer an option. He wants her more than he's ever wanted anyone before. He wants her friendship, her story, he wants to make her smile, to hear her laugh, to listen to her make that cute, sexy little noise she made on the phone when she climaxed the other day. He wants her and he'll stop at nothing to make sure he earns her.

Whatever it takes.

TBC...