Disclaimer: The wording is mine but the characters aren't
Well, that's most of the hard stuff out of the way for now.
Thanks for the reviews, they're really heartening.
OOOOOOOOO
"Castle?"
"I don't want to talk about that right now, okay?"
Or ever.
"Castle."
"I don't want to talk about it!"
He was fighting to keep himself in the moment. He couldn't afford to lose out to the memories now or he really would snap. He didn't think he had the strength to keep all the words inside again. And she wasn't ready to hear them.
She squeezed his hand. "OK."
He focused on breathing.
"Thank you, Castle."
Her voice was uncharacteristically vulnerable and he looked up to see her.
"For coming back."
OOOOOOOOO
"I think the last time I slept fully clothed was when we were drugged by aliens."
"It doesn't count," she said. "We were drugged and left on the side of the road."
"With hickeys."
"They were not aliens and those were not hickeys."
Please no more talk of that right now. It was weird enough with him standing over her shoulder as she took off her makeup. She tried to remember the last person who had done that. She supposed it would have been Lanie. Lanie was there sometimes when she put it on, but never when she took it off. She flicked a quick glance at him in the mirror and sure enough, he was staring at her. He looked pretty bitter though.
Interesting, she had always thought Castle had loved that case. Aliens, abductions and government divisions that didn't exist.
"I hope you had more luck convincing Josh of that than I had with Gina," he muttered.
She paused with the eye makeup remover an inch from her face.
"She didn't believe you?"
"She knows I make up stories for a living. And she thought that shadowy government agents were just up my alley."
She looked at him squarely in the mirror.
"I'm sorry." And she was. She knew how hard he tried that second time with his second-wife. She was sorry that they had fought, especially over work. But mostly she was sorry that Gina wouldn't believe him.
"Yeah well, my relationship with Gina was always rocky at best." He seemed to take that in stride. "And then she found out I was 'abducted'" he made the quotation marks with his free hand, obviously channeling Gina that day, "with you."
That didn't make sense. As her shadow, who else would he have gotten abducted with?
So Gina had a problem with her?
At least it went both ways then.
Castle was still looking at her, but his face had lost the edge it had before. She wasn't sure if it was because he was lost in thought, or if he was just busy watching her. She saw the look he got sometimes when he was watching her. Absorbed and sometimes tender before he masked it.
Maybe he was just still waiting for some sort of reply.
"I'm glad that was a conversation I didn't have to have with Josh," she offered, going back to removing the concealer and as much of the mascara as she could. "He was on night shifts all of that week so I didn't see him for a while until he had caught up on some of his sleep."
He wouldn't have been happy. Understatement. At that point he and Castle had only seen each other that once when he picked her up from the precinct. And he was already not a fan of all the time they spent together or the way she had so carefully not talked about him. And then after that there were very few work stories that didn't have him in it. That was when she stopped telling even the rare work story.
Yeah. She had enough conversations with Josh about Castle. She was glad she didn't have to add that one to the repertoire. Looking back on it now, she figured about a third of their conversations had something to do with Castle. Another third was about his work or his travel plans. That only left a third of their limited time dedicated to normal talking.
"Is it bad that I kind of hoped at the time that you were getting the same flack that I was?"
She smiled a little. "Partners in crime?"
"Something like that. Do you have a spare toothbrush?"
"What would you do if I said no?"
"I'd just let you deal with my morning breath tomorrow."