Falling in Love at a Coffee Shop
"You're lying," Lanie said, sitting back in her chair and giving Kate a kick with her shoe.
Kate tilted her head at the other woman, narrowing her eyes just a little. "Would I lie about that?"
Lanie fixed Kate with a look, obviously judging her honesty as she reached for a container of trail mix from her desk. "No, you wouldn't." She held out the bowl to Kate who plucked out an M&M. "Tell me the story behind this meeting then."
"I had to pick up Al from school; she only had a half-day for teacher development. We stopped at the coffee shop I always go to since I needed real coffee and Al wanted hot chocolate. Al was walking backwards into the place and was about to run into someone and I couldn't grab her in time and she hit his legs."
"Richard Castle's legs?" Lanie asked, eating a handful of nuts and raisins.
Kate only nodded. "Right smack into his calves. Then Al had a conversation with him like it was nothing. Lanie, she told him about my coffee addiction!"
"You know you have a problem when even your five year old recognizes your inability to do anything effectively without the aid of coffee, girl." She got a glare that told her to shut up or she wouldn't get the rest of the story. Lanie waved a hand for her friend to continue.
"Then Al introduced us to him, just 'I'm Al and this is Kate, my mom.' It's not right!" Kate got up, pacing in front of Lanie's desk with her hands in the pockets of her jacket. "It's not… normal."
Lanie was still crunching on trail mix, kicking her feet up onto the corner of her desk vacated by Kate's butt and crossing her legs at the ankle. "But why isn't it normal? To Al, he's just another nice guy in line for hot chocolate. He's not a New York Times Bestseller that she waited for hours in line to get a book signed by."
Kate decided that the fact that Al had been there with her at that book signing didn't need to be shared with Lanie. "That's not the end of it. He paid for our drinks."
"So?"
"So," Kate trailed, boosting herself up onto a clean autopsy table and running her hands over her face. "That's not normal or right or anything remotely close to one of those. I mean, he barely knows who we are and he's buying us coffee and hot chocolate?"
"Sweetie, you're overreacting here a little."
"But I'm not!" This time, it was Lanie's turn to glare across the short distance at Kate. "Okay, maybe a little. It's just weird to have Richard Castle buying my daughter and me drinks. And he kept looking at me like he's seen me before, like he remembered me from somewhere."
"Have you seen him before? Since the book signing?"
Kate scrunched up her nose, thinking. "He might have been in the coffee shop yesterday when I stopped on my way to canvass Tompkins Square Park."
"And did you talk to him then?"
She shook her head. "No, I was talking to Al on the phone and he just kept staring at me. This is a disaster, Lanie." Kate let her head fall into her palms, hoping that when she opened her eyes, she would be back in bed and able to start the day over sans meeting the one author whose books she would buy without looking at the back blurb.
Lanie was up, pulling herself onto the table next to Kate, crossing her feet under her despite the uneven surface. "But why is it a disaster? It's not like you got married to him while standing in line for coffee or promised him a date this Friday, right?"
"There was one thing…"
The other woman stayed silent, waiting, picking lint off her scrubs.
"I might have told Al that we'd see if we could meet up with him sometime."
"Katherine Beckett!"
"What?" Kate exclaimed, throwing her hands up in the air and letting them hit her thighs with a muffled thump. "You know how hard it is to resist Al when she wants something. And he kept looking at me with these eyes that I could swear saw into my soul and I couldn't shut Al down in front of him and Lanie, what am I going to do?"
Lanie blinked at Kate for a few moments, then slid off the autopsy table. "You're going to go see him again. With Al." Kate stared as if Lanie had just suggested that she fly off into space and live out the rest of her life on a spaceship. "Give it a week maybe. Then go back to the coffee shop and see if he is still there."
"Lanie, no…" she said, shaking her head slowly.
"Yes. If it's fate or some other cosmic being sticking their hand into your life, then he'll be there waiting. If not, you buy a cupcake and coffee and you leave." Lanie poked Kate firmly on her arm. "Deal?"
It was muttered, but Kate did say "Deal" as she got down from the table.
Al led Ryan and Esposito around the Homicide floor, handing out cookies like a fairy to uniforms and plainclothes detectives they passed. The boys walked behind her, keeping close in case a suspect was being brought around a corner or if people were going to run into the girl. They were fairly certain that even if a murder suspect was being led to the Tombs, Al would have handed him a cookie and wished him a good day before she moved on.
"So you stopped for hot chocolate?" asked Ryan, continuing the conversation as they walked out of the stairwell onto the floor for Anti-Crime. "Anything else?"
Al was given one of the detectives a cookie and a smile. "We talked to Rick. He's nice."
"Rick?" Esposito was waving to a friend to come over and grab a treat before they were gone. "Rick who?"
The girl shrugged. "Rick. We might see him again at the coffee shop."
"What'd he look like?" Ryan took one of the empty containers and tucked it against his side.
"Blue eyes. Brown hair. Tall." Another shrug. "Nice."
Ryan and Esposito exchanged glances over Al's head. The only 'Rick' that either of them knew Kate keeping close to her heart would be a writer that she pretended to be impartial to but pre-ordered every book and kept them on her shelf in the apartment in the correct order.
"Rick?" Esposito mouthed to his partner, who lifted a shoulder in response.
But then Al grabbed Ryan's wrist and pulled him toward the stairs. "Next floor!"
On Robbery's floor, as Al went around to the desks to give detectives cookies, Ryan and Esposito waited at the divider.
"She can't mean Richard Castle, can she?" asked Ryan, still watching Al.
"The only Rick I know Beckett talk about. Must have been a shock."
Then Al was back, holding up the second empty tin. "All out. I'll bring back more." And she started toward the elevator, dragging Esposito behind her.
"Later," whispered Esposito. "We'll find out later."
"I'm going back to the Twelfth. You want me to save you some cookies that Al made with my dad?" Kate asked, looking for her keys in the pocket of her jacket.
Lanie shook her head, sitting back at her desk and opening up a blank autopsy form and typing her name into the medical examiner spot. "Knowing you Becketts and your baking, there's another five containers of those cookies spread across Manhattan at various apartments. I'll find some later."
"Wouldn't be so sure of that if I was you," she tossed back as she opened the door to the hallway. "Talk to you later."
"Remember the coffee shop next week, Beckett!" Lanie called even as the door swung shut behind Kate's back.
On the ride back uptown from the medical examiner's office, Kate had plenty of time to think over Lanie's proposition, one that she still didn't see as the best idea. It wasn't that she didn't want to see him again because the fan in that deep, dark corner of her heart did want to meet up with him and share coffee and let her daughter regale him with tales of schoolwork, but it all just wasn't the typical thing for Kate Beckett to do.
Kate Beckett would pull Al back into her bubble of protection, refuse to set foot into that shop with her daughter, and maybe take out a restraining order on the author for safety's sake.
But Al had been taken with the man and Kate would not hear the end of it if she didn't at least bring the girl to the coffee shop once to prove that Richard Castle would not be waiting there for them. So she decided to go along with Lanie's plan. Next week, once Al had a chance to forget about Castle and might not mention a return trip again.
She pulled into the garage, slammed the door a little harder than strictly necessary, and headed up to the bullpen.
Ryan was sitting in her visitor chair, holding his phone out for Al. Esposito was sitting in her chair, Al perched on his knee as the girl tried her hand at the Angry Birds level Ryan was stuck on. The tip of her pink tongue was caught between her teeth in concentration; eyes squinted at the screen as she aimed the fat red bird toward the pigs off-screen.
"Haven't I mentioned something about my chair, Esposito, and you not belonging in it?" Kate asked, shedding her coat on the walk over.
The man didn't move to stand. "Yes, well, Al wanted to play Angry Birds with Ryan."
"And exactly what does that have to do with you sitting in my chair?"
Al didn't look up from the phone as she watched the bird fly across the screen and hit part of the tower protecting the birds. "It's okay. I'm done," she said, hopping off Esposito's knee and onto the ground. "Hi Mom!"
"Hey, kid. Ryan, out of her spot." The other detective got to his feet, exiting from the game application. "You two have any work?"
"We could take some of the paperwork from Kara, let you catch up your backlog," offered Esposito, flipping through some of the files on her desk with a finger. "I'm sure Records is itching to get these cases from," he paused to look at the date of one of the files, "November."
Kate wanted to insist on finishing her part of the bargain with the Kara case, but he did have a point. Some of the paperwork that had piled up on her desk was from even before November and the people down in Records did get a little grumpy about late filing.
So she sighed and pushed the files belonging to the Kara case toward Esposito. "Have fun. But let me bring them down to Records?"
"No problem, Beckett."
After the two of them walked back to their desks, dividing the work between them, Kate pulled over a file from late August and found the corresponding form that she had saved on her desktop.
"You give out all of your cookies, Al?" she asked, typing in the rest of the report.
"Yeah." Al was swinging her legs under the seat, watching Kate carefully. "Ran out though."
Kate smiled, still looking at the screen. "I'm sure we can get more from Grandpa and bring them into the other people who missed out on the first round." With a satisfying click of her mouse, she saved the file and put the manila folder into a separate pile. "Plus the boys will want a second round."
"You talk to Lanie?"
"I did. She says hi, by the way." She was searching for another really old case, wanting to work from the back of the timeline and work toward present-day. There was one from September that she tugged from under a few others.
Al then leaned on the desk, right over the file, drawing Kate's eyes down to meet hers. "You talk about Rick?"
She hesitated and in that instant, Al knew the answer. Kate nodded to confirm. "I did."
"What'd she say?" Al asked, blinking and smiling up at her mother, her chin propped on the heels of her palms.
"That she thinks you should move your arms so your mother can finish her paperwork and get you home for dinner."
"Mom," Al whined even as she shifted so Kate could move the file to the opposite side of the desk. "Really."
Perceptive little kid, Kate thought as she turned her chair the slightest toward Al. "She said that she wants some of your cookies so we'll have to save some for her. Now shush so I can finish this."
Al narrowed her eyes but didn't say anything. The faster Mom finished her paperwork meant they got home faster which meant more time to question her about Rick and the coffee shop and seeing him again.
Things were working. He loved it when things just worked without little effort or thought. Words came out and made sense and just… worked.
He hadn't noticed that his coffee had gone cold at the corner of his laptop or that the sun had started setting, casting a red-gold glow through the windows of the coffee shop.
Nicole had his full attention and he was happy to give it to her. She was smart, sophisticated, sexy. But what he really needed right now was his storyboard back at the loft to plot this out on. Coming up with murders, as much fun as it was, was incredibly difficult to do without a visual aid to help his mind connect the strands of information into a cohesive story. And it was just plain creepy to figure out a murder while in public on the back of a napkin.
At six o'clock, he put the laptop into sleep mode, coiled the charger up and put all of it into the travel case. Meredith wouldn't be back to the apartment until late, judging from the time the shows let out on Broadway, so he'd have the place to himself. She hated it when he played music, yes a little too loudly, from the study while he wrote, but he needed the background music in order to concentrate. And with this new character and storyline, he sensed he'd need some serious rock music, maybe some air guitaring between scenes, and it would be better for both of them if Meredith were absent for the next few hours.
He took a cab back to the loft, wished the driver a good evening, and hopped out. Eduardo grabbed the door before he could reach it.
"Good day, Mr. Castle?" he asked, his voice hinting at his Spanish background as he returned to the front desk of the building.
He nodded at the doorman, hitting the button on the elevator. "It really was. And yours?"
The man shook his head. "Can't complain. Would do no good."
"Spoken like a true philosopher. Have a good night, Eduardo," Castle responded as he stepped into the elevator car.
"You too, Mr. Castle," was Eduardo's reply.
He was whistling a tune that he couldn't name while he unlocked the door. Except the apartment that he had left dark that afternoon was suddenly awash with light.
"Meredith?" he called, walking forward and glancing toward the living room, the one place his girlfriend might possibly be.
Instead, it was a familiar head of hair that he found sitting on the couch. She was holding a glass of wine, the half-empty bottle on the coffee table in front of her, her barefeet propped up on the table. The hair color was the same as Meredith's though it was the bright green and turquoise dress that gave her away.
"Mother?"
Martha Rodgers turned her head and Castle didn't even register the dull thud of his laptop case hitting the ground as he ran around the couch. He sat next to her, plucking the wine glass from her hand moments before she curled against his side.
"What's wrong?" he asked, running a hand over her arm, more than a little confused.
She had moved out almost six months ago after getting married for a second time, certain that two was her lucky number, not three. Paul had made her feel young and beautiful and had joined her on duets from shows she had performed in. Castle had liked the man and had told his mother that when she had come to him to ask his advice about accepting Paul's proposal. They had talked often, either over the phone or going out to dinner with Paul and Meredith in tow.
Castle nearly missed his mother's response while lost in his thoughts. "He's gone."
"Who's gone, Mother?"
Martha pulled back, using the long sleeve of her dress to wipe at mascara that had stained her cheeks. "Paul is gone. With the money. All of it."
He had another instant before she tugged him into a hug, her head resting on his shoulder. "What am I going to do, Richard?"
"We'll figure it out, Mother. We'll figure it out."
As soon as I figure out how to explain this to Meredith, he thought to himself. Because that's not going to be an easy task.