Falling in Love at a Coffee Shop
The day was filled with paperwork. Not only did Kate have a backlog of past cases that she needed to type up and file officially but she took most of the forms required for the Kara case to fill out. She wanted to feel like she wasn't abandoning the case completely and while paperwork was some of the least appealing pieces of building a case for the district attorneys, if that's what she could do for Jenna, Olivia, and Molly, then she'd take the drudgery and run with it.
She sipped at her coffee, typing with her free hand while she checked the time. Twelve-sixteen. Probably time to go get Al from school, bring her to visit the rag-tag team of uncles that the girl so adored.
Finishing off the form and saving it, Kate closed down the computer and picked up her keys from the base of the photos on her desk.
"Going to get our favorite five year old?" asked Ryan, looking up as soon as Kate got to her feet and shrugged her jacket on.
"No. I'm leaving you to the paperwork for the rest of the day." She rolled her eyes, jingling her keys with her finger through the keyring. "Obviously I'm going to pick up Al."
Esposito was coming back from the break room, setting Ryan's mug of coffee on his partner's desk before sitting in his chair. "Good. I've been craving those cookies since you mentioned them."
This time, Kate glared and Esposito held his hands up in defense. "Kidding. I'd like to see Ale-" he hesitated when her eyes narrowed, "Al most of all."
"That's right. I'll be back in forty-five minutes or so. Might stop for real coffee before coming back to share her with you all," Kate called back over her shoulder.
Peters was at the desk, a different novel in his hands, the same bottle of fruit punch at his elbow. "Heard you were bringing cookies back with you, Beckett."
"Does everyone know about this?" she asked, not stopping to chat with the man. She promised that this would be the last time she let Al bring any type of food into the precinct since this was always the reaction. Not only did her entire floor know about the possibility of food, but it seemed that when the food came from an adorable child, suddenly the entire department received some sort of chain e-mail to inform them to show up at the Twelfth around twelve-thirty.
Her stomach grumbled as she drove but she didn't pull over to grab something, deciding that a stop at her coffee shop would be warranted. Al could get hot chocolate to bring back to the precinct since she definitely wasn't getting coffee. The girl was hyper enough; Kate didn't want to find out what that amount of caffeine would do to her.
Kate got to Al's school early enough to grab a parking spot right outside the doors, but she still got out and leaned against the hood of the car. She kept her hands stuffed into the deep pockets of the leather jacket she had traded in for at the apartment, wanting the warm lining as an extra layer of protection against the biting wind. She still had time until she needed to move over to their meeting spot so she stayed with the still-warm hood of the car keeping her lower back heated against the chill outside.
"You're Al's mother." She turned and saw a pretty woman, her dark blonde hair pulled into a messy bun, wearing a smile. "I'm Gianna, Maria's mom." It must have been Kate's completely lost expression that had the woman clarifying. "She's a friend of Al's."
"Oh, uh, hi," Kate started, shifting so she wasn't using the car as a prop. "I'm Kate."
"You know, Al looks just like you. Maria, she got all of her father's looks."
Kate took a step forward, pointing over toward the school. "I need to meet Al over there. Can we walk and talk?"
The woman followed, shrugging. "Anyway, Al obviously inherited your looks. Except those eyes. Such pretty blue eyes, you know? Her father?"
That had Kate stumbling a little, trying to shake it off as they reached the meeting spot. Al's father. "Not in the picture."
"Sorry," Gianna said, standing next to Kate but not meeting her eyes.
"It's fine. Not something that matters anymore."
They were both saved the awkwardness when Al and a girl that must have been Maria came toward them. The latter child was definitely her father's spitting image since her mother did not have long, straight black hair or warm brown eyes.
"Mom, this is Maria," Al said, introducing the other girl.
Kate smiled at the girl. "Hi, Maria. I'm Kate."
She ducked her head, hiding those eyes behind a curtain of hair. "Hi, Mrs. Beckett."
Al took her mother's hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. "Oh, Mom isn't married."
Oh goodness, Kate thought, raising her eyes to the sky for an instant. Like this could get any more uncomfortable. "It's fine, Al. Come on, time to visit the uncles. It was nice meeting you, Gianna, Maria."
Kate didn't turn the radio on for the short drive from Al's school to the coffee shop. She was waiting for her mind to stop racing, bracing for the inevitable question.
"Will I get to see Lanie?"
Not the expected question at all. Kate shrugged. "Maybe. She seemed a little busy, but the lure of cookies might get her uptown for a visit."
"I'm going to get coffee, kid. You want hot chocolate or something?" Kate asked as she pulled the car against the curb, throwing it into park.
Al was already unbuckling, setting the tins of cookies that she had held securely in her lap up on the dashboard. "I'll come in and see if I feel like anything."
In a move that was almost comical, the two of them pulled their coats closer to their bodies at the same time as Kate locked the car, keeping a careful eye on Al as she skipped around the nose of the vehicle and up on to the sidewalk.
Kate tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as she held the door open for her daughter, giving the matching hair style on the girl a little tug. Al giggled, turning to smile up at Kate, walking backwards until Kate reached forward before she bumped into the tall man waiting in line.
She was too late. Al collided with the man's legs, quickly stepping forward to hold onto Kate's legs even as the man turned to see what had hit him.
And Kate found herself looking into the blue eyes of Richard Castle.
The clock in the corner of his laptop screen said it was eleven-forty A.M.
"Close enough," he whispered to the screen as he shut it with a snap. Castle found the padded travel case, slipped the laptop and charger into it before zipping it up. He tossed it onto the couch, upsetting the book on the events of the Roaring Twenties in New York City that had been perched on the cushions from research for the latest Derrick Storm novel. Another thing he needed to finish. He sidetracked, picked it up, and placed it on the coffee table before nearly running into the bedroom.
He stood in front of his closet and glanced at the navy v-neck sweater he had pulled on post-shower. Was this good enough to go see her again or should he dress up? No, stick with the sweater, he told himself. Who goes to see a person he's never actually talked to in a suit?
Castle opened the hall closet and pulled out a long black wool coat and a thick scarf, putting them on as he went to grab the laptop and his phone from the desk in the study. He did remember to leave a note to Meredith about where he was in case she returned early from her lunch date. He doubted it – she'd just go shopping with his credit card – but he wanted to play it safe. At the end of the little sticky note, Castle scribbled down the names and numbers of the possible agents with question marks next to them.
A cab was right outside the building, so he took that rather than wait for the car service to send someone out to SoHo. It was three past when he paid the driver and leapt from the taxi.
His seat from the day before was open and Castle claimed it with his laptop case. He opened it, starting it back up from the sleep mode it had gone into on the ride over, and finally allowed himself to maximize the document that had been taunting him all morning.
It was the writer in him that had stories spinning about her background, her childhood, her family before he even knew her. He started jotting down some of the ideas that stood out in his mind. She was the middle child with two brothers on either side of her, her protectors. Not that she couldn't hold her own with them, often besting both brothers and their friends at tree-climbing contests and foot races. Her parents were well-off enough to let their children pursue their dreams. The oldest might have gone to med school and was even now working in third-world countries with Smile Train. Then there was Katherine who decided to attend the police academy after college where she majored in English literature and sociology. The youngest brother, Castle hypothesized, went the musician's course and was touring with his little indie group in a beaten-up Volkswagen van.
He liked his fictional back story for her, smiling at the screen as he typed it all up. Then he hit the button to add a page break, keeping her make-believe biography on one page and letting him start on a fresh slate for the next part of his little exercise.
By the time he finished a few paragraphs, he stood up, stretching from side to side as he locked the laptop screen. Coffee time, since his cop hadn't shown up yet. He had been glancing up from the computer screen every couple of words, hoping for a glimpse of her Crown Victoria. It hadn't come and he was more than a little disappointed in himself.
He didn't know whether this was her usual stop for coffee or if she had simply been passing it on her way home and needed the caffeine right then and there. He didn't know whether she was working at the moment and wouldn't have time to stop for a drink just past noon; some people had set hours for their job instead of writing whenever his muse whispered in his ear, which was rarer and rarer these days. Hell, maybe he freaked her out the last time he saw her and she was now making a point to avoid this particular coffee shop for the rest of her life in case he was doing exactly what he was in the process of doing: creepily stalking her at the shop, waiting for her to enter.
Shaking his head, Castle slipped his phone into his hand and went to stand in the relatively long line at the counter. It was lunch time and people stopped in for coffee more often than they did for the pastries and little grilled sandwiches the place served. They were on their Bluetooths, seeming to chatter away to themselves as they waved their hands wildly.
He opened up one of the mindless games he had downloaded last time he had faced writer's embarrassment and started a new game. It had something to do with matching up famous quotes with their speaker. It amused him to see just how many he got right from years of research in obscure fields and how many he was so certain of only to find out he had been thinking incorrectly for years.
Castle was just matching Judy Garland to her quote "For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul" with a silent message of thanks to his mother when someone hit him from behind. He fumbled with the phone, caught it in mid-air and had to think he might have a bit of ninja in him, and turned to see what had banged into his calves.
The girl was clinging to a woman's legs, her brown curls hiding her face as she pressed her cheek to black work pants. She was cute, maybe four or five, wearing a pretty red coat with a grey scarf wrapped around her neck.
But it was the woman she was holding onto in her mortification was the one that drew his attention.
It was her.
Sure, she had changed from her peacoat of yesterday into a soft leather jacket with the peek of white lining at the cuffs, but the hair and the eyes and the facial structure that he had memorized in those seconds of meeting yesterday were exactly the same. And she was staring at him just like she had before.
"Sorry," she was saying, his eyes drawn to the gentle curve of her mouth as she spoke.
Castle shook his head quickly, sliding the phone into the pocket of his jeans. "Not a problem. We all get a little excited sometimes, don't we, little one?"
"Not little!" the girl suddenly exclaimed, letting go of the woman's legs and standing on her own. "I'm five!"
The woman's shoulders shook with silent laughter, a smile across her face as she reached down to thread her fingers through the girl's hair. "Of course you are."
"And that's not little. I misspoke and I apologize." Castle was keeping a poker face though he wanted to grin.
"Accepted," said the girl with a firm nod of her head. "We're getting hot chocolate. Except Mom. She gets coffee because she's add… addic…" She scrunched up her nose, twisted to look up at the still-smiling woman. "What's the word?"
The woman's smile stayed in place as she ruffled the curls. "Addicted." And then she looked over at him and Castle swore his heart might have melted a little. "And not really."
"Yes really. You drink it all of the time." The girl freed herself from the caress over her hair. "Line moved forward."
Castle turned and saw that it had. "So it did." He took a few steps toward the counter, still four people away from ordering. "You like hot chocolate?"
The woman's hazel eyes were wary though she was working hard to keep her face impassive. Castle was good at reading people and he could tell she was watching him carefully around the girl. He was fairly certain it was her daughter though that was a detail that he had not fit into his little made-up story for her. This had him wondering about a husband, other children.
But the girl was talking, waving her hands as she explained that sometimes she was brave and tried peppermint in her hot chocolate but mostly like it plain, that she only got the drink when she was good or they were going someplace special like they were today.
She was still speechless. She was standing in line for coffee with her daughter, who was animatedly talking to her favorite writer about her mother's addiction to coffee and how Al took her hot chocolate. It was like a dream or a nightmare or some sort of strange combination of both.
He kept throwing her these glances that had her smiling without thinking and how could Kate really pull Al away from him because he wasn't exactly a stranger. Kate's nature had her on guard around people who casually started up a conversation with Al and best-selling mystery authors were no different.
Before Kate could stop her, Al was holding out a small hand. "I'm Al and this is my mom, Kate. Who are you?" She had tried to warn Al not to give out their names, not that they were famous, but the less people knew about you, the harder it was for them to find you again.
The man took her daughter's hand and shook it. "I'm Rick. It's nice to meet you Al." He glanced up at Kate and gave her that same smile he had given her at the book signing years ago. "And you, Kate."
"Sir, what can I get you?"
The barista startled him and Kate watched his shoulders jerk up before he turned, ordering a black coffee. Just when the woman at the cash register asked if that was it, Castle was looking over his shoulder at her. "And what they want."
"Oh no, we can't-" was as far into her protest that he let her get before shocking her even more with a finger placed over her lips even as they continued to move before stilling completely.
"It's not a problem." He stepped to the side just a bit and let her move closer. "Go on."
She let her eyes flicker toward him as she got Al's small hot chocolate and her medium latte. He gave Al's name, a gesture that had the girl grinning as she walked over to the counter where they could pick up the drinks with a gleeful "Thanks, Rick!" tossed into the air.
Kate bit her lower lip as she followed her daughter over. "You didn't need to do that, you know."
"But I wanted to. She's a nice girl. Makes me wish I had kids of my own."
"They're a handful sometimes," Kate said quietly. "But mostly they're lovely."
He had his hands in his pockets, standing at her shoulder as they waited. "Just one or…?"
Kate swallowed, shaking her head. Twice in one day. "It's just Al and I."
"That has to be tough." He looked genuinely interested in the conversation as he tilted his head to the side. "I can't image being a single parent."
"I've got lots of help." Lots and lots of help that she wasn't sure she'd be able to survive without having by her side.
Then Al was pushing her coffee cup into her hands before reaching back up to give Castle his. "Here." She waited until he had it securely in his hand before letting go. "Maybe we can see you here again?" she asked, glancing up at Kate.
Kate ghosted a smile. "Maybe, kid." Then she met his eyes for the first real time since walking into the coffee shop. "Thanks again, Rick. Perhaps next time I'll buy for us."
"I'd like that," he replied. "Have a good afternoon, Al, Kate."
He sat back at that same table she had seen him use yesterday, open up a laptop, and let his fingers fly across the keyboard as he typed in the password. She held the door for Al who went to stand next to the door of the car, waiting for Kate to unlock them.
After she buckled in, Kate had to hold onto the wheel to stop her hands from shaking. She just had a conversation with Richard freakin' Castle. Who had also bought her and her daughter drinks. And she had implied that they might meet back at the coffee shop again.
"He was nice. I like him," Al was babbling, her hands still wrapped around her warm cup. "We can see him again, right Mom?"
Kate nodded absentmindedly as she put the car into gear. "Maybe, Al. But we need to go see Espo, Ryan, and Cap now so they don't call me wondering where your cookies are."
The girl bounced in her seat. "That's right! Go, Mom! I want to see your boys!"
Okay. She could drop Al off with the boys, let her entertain them, during which time she could call up Lanie and die a little over the phone. Solid plan, Kate.