They have a rhythm now.
It's a tentative rhythm, borne of six days of long flat roads through fields and grassy plains. They still stumble through the edges of their nascent routine, tripping up against and into each other, but it's becoming more of a steady, reliable thing, a swing and step through the day into which they're slowly sliding.
He always wakes up to pale dawn light and to the hum and gurgle of the travel coffee maker they bought at Target on their second day. (They drink it black, now - didn't bother with creamer the first time, and he doesn't even want sugar anymore. He's growing accustomed to the acrid burn of it on his tongue.) Sometimes they make it through a sip, sometimes through half a mug before fingers start brushing over thighs and lips start crashing into lips and they fall back into bed, occasionally with a frenetic, crackling energy, occasionally with a quiet, lazy morning cadence that drifts them back into a doze against each other.
He's come to like the feel of cool black coffee sliding down his throat, has come to associate it with the taste of Beckett's skin and the smooth heat of her body.
They shower. Twice it's taken them an extra half hour; twice they haven't been able to resist crowding into one of the too-small stalls together as the hot water slowly started streaming cold over their tangled bodies.
They dress and pack. They rarely touch the duffle of cash. It sits in the corner of the room or under the bed. They haven't gotten around to getting Beckett her own bag yet – "It'll look weird, us checking in for one night with three separate pieces of luggage," she'd murmured as they'd stood before a suitcase display in a random WalMart, and he hasn't brought it up since, hasn't wanted anything other than the press and swirl together of everything they have.
He doesn't know when they'll have an efficient morning, doesn't know if he'll ever stopped being entranced by the slippery smooth heat of her enough to roll out of bed, drink his coffee, get dressed, leave the motel. He doesn't mind.
She always drives first.
Some mornings she's boneless beneath him by the time they've finished, her limbs loose and heavy and sated, but always by the time they're walking out the door she's humming with a nervous kind of energy, a low vibration that he can tell she needs to channel into something.
They eat granola bars or apples in the car as they drive. He doesn't like to stop more often than they have to. Not since the second day when there was a middle-aged woman in a tiny diner during breakfast that kept glancing at his face, assessing, like she might have recognized him. Definitely not since the third evening, when for fifteen miles there was, far behind them, the hazy outline of a dark sedan.
She never stops until lunch. They pull off at some roadside diner, or, on the days when she's still crackling with unreleased energy, a drive-through McDonalds. She always pulls her hair back before leaving the car (only sometimes, when she's driving, does she open the window and take out the elastic and let the strands whip free around her face). They both have baseball caps they wear in public. She's developed the habit of ducking her head, hiding her eyes beneath the brim of hers.
He drives after lunch, ever since a heated fight the second day when she, with pale cheeks and smudged circles under her eyes, still refused to relinquish the keys. He drives until they find a place to stop, a squat dingy strip of a motel where they can remain anonymous. They eat dinner at a diner or get takeout. Last night it was pizza that they fed to each other as they slouched on the bed. He wants takeout all the time.
The nights are his favorite. All of the different ways she can slowly, steadily unravel him, the press and roll of her body against him up on the wall or in the bed or under the shower spray or on the floor. The mornings are always shadowed by their impending departures, the looming stretch of a long day on the road, the worry of potential exposure, but the nights, the long and shadowed hours unfurling before them in which they are slowly learning to worry about only each other, the nights he's learned to love.
He calls Alexis every third day.
They call Esposito every other day. There are no leads.
They switch cars twice, dumping the old ones in the woods, buying new ones at cheap lots off the beaten path.
They drive without real aim, without goals. He tracks their progress on the map with a highlighter he bought from WalMart, tracing over their winding routes through the middle of the country. It's the hours, the distance, the space logged that counts. They don't discuss their lack of destination.
It's surprising only that he's the first one that creates a tiny jag in their rhythm, that he's driving down a long straight road at two in the afternoon, still full from lunch, and he glances over at her to see her curled against the window, legs up against her chest, absently, slowly drumming her fingers against her knee, and then he's veering off the pavement onto the dirt shoulder near a field of hay and stepping out of the car. He squints through the bright sun, lets the heat beat down against him, walks up to the grassy stalks that brush up to his chin.
He hears her door close softly.
This is not good. This is dangerous for her. He – he is still sometimes dangerous for her.
He feels her fingertips at her shoulders, cool compared to the midday heat, feels her breath brush lightly over his scapula. He shivers in the sun.
"Did I…" she whispers, trails off, circling her fingers lightly over the ridge of his shoulder.
He shakes his head, feels the grass scratching at his stubble. Here, there is only the vibrancy of her at his back, the warm pulse of the sun, the scrape of the hay against him. "Never been to Iowa," he says. They'll cross into Nebraska by nightfall. He hasn't been outside in this state except to traverse the distance between the diners and the car and the motels. Hasn't stopped to notice the different kind of beautiful, here, the way the sun starts to catch and shadow gold the stalks of grass, the crooked cracking red of a slanting barn in the distance, the sway and rhythm of the field in the barely-there breeze.
She shifts around him, her chest brushing against his bicep, until she's in the grass too, framed by it, staring into his eyes. She lifts her arms, curls her fingers around the back of his neck, leans in to brush her lips over his. Her hair catches the same golden light as the stalks of grass, and it's all at once too much. He looks up into the hard cobalt of the sky, closes his eyes, drops his forehead to rest against hers.
It's hard to vocalize the tyranny of the open road, the oppression of the vast swathes of space that they can never absorb, that they can do nothing but pass quickly through on their way from claustrophobic motel to claustrophobic motel.
He feels her index finger over his lips, quieting his thoughts, anchoring him in the steady physicality of her presence. He can't help but suck in a breath, part his mouth, draw her finger in with his teeth and lave his tongue over it. He lifts a hand to place it on the center of her chest, feels her sternum stutter up against his fingers, feels a wanting hum echo through down through her torso.
"Castle," she exhales, drawing her finger slowly away but leaving her hand just outside his mouth. He kisses his way along her knuckles, stopping at the battered bands of metal around her ring finger, exhaling lightly over them.
He will never be able to stop himself from wanting every part of her.
He skates his palms up under the hem of her shirt, feeling along the ridges of her spine as he crowds into her body, drops his mouth to her neck, grazes his teeth along a tendon in her neck. Her nails dig into his back, sharp bright pinpricks through his shirt.
"It's nice out," he says into her neck, spreading his fingers over her lower back, cradling her ever closer, bumping her hips into his. Her hands tighten, her nails nearly breaking his skin, as she settles her leg over one of his. "I just wanted to feel the sun."
"Next car we'll get the sunroof option," she says, canting her hips harder into his thigh.
He inhales sharply. "And leather seats. Satellite Radio."
"I'd settle for an air conditioner that worked more than intermittently," she gasps, dropping her forehead to his shoulder as she rocks again.
They need to stop now, need to stop before they can't anymore. "Beckett," he breathes, his voice pleading, warning.
"I know," she breathes, "Okay. I know." They're both exhaling in sharp, staccato bursts. She starts to settle down off of him, tries to step firmly back onto the grass, but her legs clench tighter around him and this low, needy moan echoes in her throat as she sinks her teeth into his collarbone, hard enough to hurt.
"Just –" he starts, grabbing her elbows and spinning them so that his back is to the grass and his eyes are on the road, and this is so wrong, this is so much needless danger, but he can feel her hot breath on his chest and he won't stop now, won't ever be able to deny her this.
He drops his thigh back and she growls jaggedly, but then he's sliding his fingers into her shorts and she's rocking and gasping against him, her breath coming in these sobbing gasps that cut through him, flay him, and it's not soon enough and all too soon before she's shaking against him, clenching silently as she pants jaggedly into the hollow of his throat.
One of his hands is still wrapped underneath her elbow, holding her up, waiting until she finally lifts her head and stares up at him with dark, dilated pupils.
She reaches for him, but he wraps his free hand lightly around her wrist, shaking his head. They've been far too careless already.
"You get to know Iowa a little better?" she husks as they start back towards the car.
"Yeah," he says. "Good state."