He doesn't like the way the kid behind the desk is looking at him, the way his eyes keep flicking from the dark, shadowed bruises on Beckett's throat to Castle's hands. "One room?" he asks, a thread of anger underpinning his tone.
"Yeah," Beckett says, her voice silk over steel, daring him to say anything.
The kid lets up, doesn't even ask them for their names. She pays with a crumple of bills, takes the key, and stalks away without another word.
"I'll wear a turtleneck tomorrow," Beckett says gently to him as they step into the dingy room. He tosses their two bags in a corner, slumps down onto the bed, rubs his hand over his eyes.
He huffs a sigh. "Too warm," he murmurs.
She shrugs, the motion of her shoulders stiff, stilted. "It's making people notice us too much." He knows it's not just that. Knows that she notices his tension at the accusations, knows that she sees how quiet he gets at the thought of his hurting her.
He hums noncommittally, unsure what to say. She hovers near the corner of the room, next to the window, leaning lightly against the wall with her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes vaguely unfocused. All day, all he's wanted has been her, the press and heat and verve of her lithe body beneath him, but now that they're in the drab, dim motel room, the distance between them is suddenly vast, insurmountable.
"Just call, Castle," she says, glancing at his hand.
He's tapping his fingers against the burner phone. He didn't even realize it was sitting next to him, didn't realize his index finger was tattooing a steady beat against the metal shell. "We shouldn't use it that much," he says. He still feels it in his stomach, the tight knot of dread that coiled when the black sedan drove past them, the echo of the rush and roar of his pulse in his ears.
She arcs an eyebrow at him, silent, assessing, like she has this knowledge of his needs deep inside her, thrumming through her veins.
"Maybe if I keep it short?" he asks, feeling the yearning twist deep in his chest. His iPhone's stayed off, battery and SIM card in a separate bag. Anything – anything could have happened. He suddenly feels claustrophobic, trapped, the different kinds of panic pressing against him in the dark room, crumpling him inward with the force of it, with worry over his family, with terror for Beckett's life.
"Go on," she says.
His fingers start to trip over the slightly gluey buttons of the Motorola, but he pauses four numbers in. "You think they're watching her line?"
Beckett nods. "Could be. Probably."
He drops the phone back down to the bed.
At the look on his face she sighs, slumps down a little against the wall. "Have her call you back on a different line. Five seconds won't give them anything." He starts to shake his head. "Now," she says, still gentle, but some of the toughness back in her voice.
He dials. Presses the phone tightly to his ear. It rings once. Twice. He swivels to face the doorway, lets his eyes bump over the chipping white paint, the slightly-askew handle, the dark streak across the center of it.
"Hello?" he hears his daughter ask, tentative, hopeful.
"Alexis," he says, closing his eyes against the near-painful relief at the sound of her voice, strong and healthy, echoing into his ear.
"Oh thank god," she breathes, and then he can hear her shouting, Gram, it's Dad! "Hang on, just –" And then there's the click of a dial tone.
He closes the phone, stares down blankly at it, feeling Beckett's eyes burning into him. He doesn't pick his head up. He swallows down the dread.
A sharp trill has them both flinching. He snaps the phone open, presses it hard against his ear.
"Hey, sorry - Esposito gave us a phone, told us to use it instead. I think he and Beckett's dad have them too, now." Her words spill out in a torrent, but she pauses, and he can picture the slight furrow above her eyebrows as she collects herself. "Are you okay?"
He shakes his head, the relief at her voice swamping his mind, addling his brain. "I'm fine. Great. How was your trip?"
He can hear her sharp inhale, can hear her biting back all her questions that she must know he won't, can't answer. "It was good," she says. "We're at mom's right now. Everything's been fine. We've already had two shopping sprees. It's – it's weird, with the guards, but I'm getting used to it." She pauses, huffs a laugh. "Gina called. I think you might miss a deadline or two."
He hisses out a breath. He couldn't care less about deadlines, can't find the space in his heart to worry over Nikki when the live version of her is in so much danger, but he hasn't spent much time thinking about the real consequences. He's not so famous, not so recognizable that a clerk in a dingy motel will light up in recognition, but some people will notice his absence, after a while, some people willnotice if he suddenly drops off the face of the earth, and here he is, not thinking things through again, putting Beckett in danger again because of it. He's careless, too careless with her life, even when he doesn't mean to be, even when all he wants is to protect her.
His mother's voice sounds into the phone, the breeziness only slightly forced. "I told her you were hospitalized for exhaustion, dear, and that you needed an extended country vacation to recover. No writing."
He gapes. "You didn't."
"You work so hard, darling. It's not that much of a stretch."
"Mother. You basically told my ex-wife that I was in rehab."
He hears a chuckle from the corner of the room, looks up to see Beckett's eyes dancing in amusement. She's on her knees in front of his duffle, her plastic bags from Target spread across the floor, but she's momentarily arrested, her fingers clutching a shirt, her lips curved into a bemused smile. It's almost worth being in imaginary rehab.
Martha must take his silence as acceptance. "It's barely page six news, anyway. It's not like you did anything to go out in spectacular flames of glory."
"It's in the papers already?" he hisses. He hears Beckett's give a very un-Beckett-like snort, but he doesn't look back over to her, wants to keep his sense of righteous indignation flaring for at least a moment.
"Well of course," Martha says, and then Alexis is talking into the phone again before he can get out another word.
"Really, it was my idea, Dad, I just – thought it was a good story." And that hurts, somehow, hurts more than it should, the idea of his daughter pretending that he's in rehab so she can be safe, the ripples that it will have across her own life.
"Are you okay with that?" he murmurs.
He hears her laugh, a little brittle. "Yeah. All the in crowd has dads in rehab. Having the dependable, loving parent is so last year."
Her words knock into him, crash the breath out of his lungs, make him inhale a little too desperately for air.
"Kidding, I'm kidding," she's whispering, but of course she's not, not really. "I get it. I really – I get it."
"I –" he says, cuts himself off, not sure what he can possibly offer her.
"I know. You have to go," she supplies, sounding only slightly wounded.
"Alexis," he says, trying to let her hear it, how very sorry he is.
"Really," she murmurs, her voice more of an absolution now. "I didn't understand before, and I wish it wasn't like this, but I just –" she breaks off with a sigh, and he can see her almost as clearly as if she was standing right in front of him, shrugging slightly. "I love you."
The call clicks off before he can respond.
He wonders when he'll stop feeling like this, so aching, so empty, wonders if this is some insight into how Beckett feels all the time, the jagged edges of her mother's absence always brushing up against the softest parts of her.
He breathes through it – everyone he loves is okay, physically unharmed, at least, and that has to be enough to cling to for now. He bows his head, fiddles with his too-tight wedding ring, twisting it back and forth on his finger, relishing the slight pain as it pulls along his skin.
When he can finally look over at Beckett again, she's carefully smoothing a pair of jeans into his duffle bag. Earlier, when she was laughing at him, he hadn't registered, hadn't understood what she was doing. He realizes, now: she's moving her recently-acquired clothing into the empty parts of his duffle bag. She stills, looking up into his eyes, her fingers worrying the collar of a shirt she's just picked up. "I wanted –" she starts, swallows, continues. "I didn't think to buy a bag. But I can get one, soon." She shrugs, gesturing over to his phone. "I wanted to – give you time. Space." She smiles self-deprecatingly, maybe at the twisted logic of giving him space by moving her clothing into his bag.
He pushes himself off the bed, walks across the room, kneels down on the other side of the duffle bag from her, and reaches into a plastic bag and feels the light, slinky slide of fabric over his fingers. He emerges with his hand wrapped around a pair of dark blue underwear.
"There is absolutely no way that that wasn't intentional," Beckett says, glaring at him as she folds a tank top into the side compartment. It's lucky his bag is stupidly huge; even so, it's going to be a tight fit.
She's not going to prod him, not going to ask him about his family, and he feels an overwhelming rush of affection and gratitude for her, for this woman who knows when to push and when to stop. His fingers clench around the scrap of fabric in his palm, and he feels the affection melt into something deeper and darker, flooding through his veins.
He realizes he's just sitting there, holding her underwear and staring at her instead of actually being useful, and even if she's feeling sorry for him there's only so long he can get away with this before she calls him out. He sighs, shifts, moves toward the duffle bag. This is a big deal, this is her tank tops against his jeans and her bras against his shirts, this is all she has right now, and she's throwing it into his bag. It's too much and not enough all at once.
She's folding a bra into a side compartment at the same time that he finally jerks himself into motion again, and suddenly her knuckles are brushing against his forearm. The warmth and shock of her skin startles through him, makes him gasp, makes his fist clench open and then closed. The underwear drops to the floor, but he can't bring himself to care, not when his heart is thudding arrhythmically against his sternum, not when Beckett has stilled, her eyes dark, her knuckles still against his arm.
"Castle," she whispers, and he can't tell whether it's a warning or an invitation but it doesn't matter because it's impossible for him to stop himself from leaning forward, over the duffle, grabbing the jut of her hipbones and pressing his mouth into hers, suddenly desperate, suddenly needing nothing but the lift and life of her body.
A rumble echoes in the back of her throat when he moves to her jaw, her neck, scraping his teeth over her pale skin, sweeping gentle kisses over the swathes of her darkened by bruises. His back and legs and neck are already spasming, echoing with a dull pain because this is no type of position into which anyone his age should be contorting, but he can't stop, can't break his mouth away from her, can't imagine how it's been nearly an entire twenty-four hours since he lost himself in the slick slide of her body.
She tangles a hand in the hair at the back of his head, tries to use another one to drag the duffle out of their way, growls in frustration when she can't. Her shoulders, he reminds himself, her shoulders and her ribs and her hip and her back, he needs to be careful, he needs to stop mauling her on the floor.
"Bed," he growls against her collarbone, his breath already coming hard and fast, his body already completely undone by her.