There's a Holiday Inn on the right side of the road that today, just today, tugs at him, has him easing off the gas as he imagines the clean rooms, the smooth sheets, the steady stream of hot water in the shower.
"I think we should stay there tonight." He tilts his chin at the hotel, suddenly apprehensive, suddenly yearning.
Beckett doesn't quite catch it, her eyes barely flicking over the building. "No, Castle," she says, voice just this side of bored.
"No, really," he tries.
"Too much money," she murmurs, offhand. She's slouched in the passenger seat, her fingers tracing nonsensical circles over the center console that, even as he battles his frustration with her, he can't help but find slightly arousing.
"We have plenty of money. Spending one night in a place that's a couple steps up from Fleabag Motel once'll be okay." She stills, turns to stare at him. "I mean, it's hardly the Ritz, Beckett. It's a Holiday Inn."
"Castle," she says, voice suddenly stronger, more present. At least she's paying attention now. "The people at the shitty motels don't remember faces. They make it a point to forget faces. We start stepping up, even for a little, and we make it that much more likely that some overly-friendly concierge remembers us."
He shifts, tries not to let the sudden, irrational disappointment scrawl across his face. "It's our week-iversary," he says. He's going for breezy, lighthearted, but he can't help the weight at the edges of his words.
"That's not a thing, Castle," Beckett says, gently chiding.
"It is, and it's ours right now." He decides to push a little harder. He wouldn't, would never if he thought it would actually put her in danger, but – it's just a Holiday Inn. He's driving slowly down the road; he could hook a U-turn and have them back there in two minutes. "It could be fun to celebrate by splurging a little. Doing something different."
"Celebrate what," she breathes, so quietly he almost doesn't hear it. The words echo in his mind for a second, two, pinball there for the next half minute, and then he's slowly swerving onto the road's wide, paved shoulder, stopping the car softly, his foot easing down on the brake.
He lets himself feel the impact of her words only when he's carefully pulled the parking brake up. "What do you mean, celebrate what?" he hisses. There's an edge to his tone that shouldn't be there for what's more than likely just a simple misunderstanding. He's tired, and it's getting late, and he just – he wants more for her, more than the drab hotels and endless travel that wears at both of them, more than the fake, battered rings too loose around her fourth finger, more than all of it.
"Nothing," she murmurs, staring out the windshield, refusing to look at him, refusing to engage.
The words tumble out of him, visceral, raw. "Do you regret this, Beckett?" He gestures sharply between the two of them.
"Of course I do," she growls, low in the back of her throat, and oh, oh that hurts more than he ever thought it could. She finally turns to him, must see something in the stricken expression on his face that makes her continue. "Look at your life – your career, your home, your family, your daughter. Who knows when you'll get to see her, when you'll get to see any of that again? All that time I waited so I wouldn't hurt you." He can see her nails flex sharply into her thigh. "If only I hadn't gone to your place that night…" She trails off.
"If you hadn't gone to my place, I might not have seen the text until the morning. You might have been home when whoever ransacked your apartment got there."
She shrugs, wordless.
"What do you think they would have done to you?" he growls.
She reaches down, lifts a plastic bottle from the floor of the car. Her throat works as she takes a swig of water. "I know what they would have tried to do to me, Castle."
Her words clench in his chest, contract his muscles, and he needs to let it out, somehow, the horrible energy that's suddenly coiled in his body from the images her words have created. He slams the heel of his hand into the top of the steering wheel, relishes the solid thump, the pain that flares up his arm in fiery spindles, the jerk and flinch of her body in the passenger seat.
He closes his eyes. Focuses on the burn in his hand. On the warmth of the sun, slanting through the windshield onto his face. On the nearly-inaudible sound of her almost-steady inhales and exhales. When he finally feels more in control, when he can finally look, she's turned in the seat, legs curled up underneath her, watching him with a dark seriousness in her eyes. "I wake up with you in the mornings and I'm so happy –" she swallows, flicks her gaze out the windshield before looking back at him – "I'm so happy to see you. But I can't – you have to know – this is so much less than you deserve."
"What about you?" he whispers, but she just silently shakes her head. He's deflated, out of words. She's going to break him, going to kill him with how cavalierly she treats her life, with how steadfastly she puts his safety above their togetherness.
He swallows. Puts the car in gear. Pulls out onto the road, eyes already scanning for yet another cheap motel.
The bed is cold. He blinks his eyes open, rubs at them blearily. There's rain pounding on the sheet-metal roof of the motel. The sound echoes around the dark room.
She's sitting on the battered sofa underneath the window, her knees drawn up, one arm drawn around her shins. Her right hand – her right hand is wrapped around her gun. She's utterly motionless except for that one hand, tapping out a staccato rhythm on her kneecap with the handle of the Glock.
He pushes himself abruptly into a sitting position. "Beckett," he says, his voice coming out far more sharply than he'd intended, but he can't – he wishes she wasn't holding her gun like that. Like's she's itching to use it on something.
Her hand stills. "Sorry, Castle," she says, voice low. "Didn't mean to wake you. Go back to sleep."
Like hell. He gets out of the bed, shivers a little, sinks down onto the couch at her feet.
"It was the rain, I think," he mumbles, shifting to find a more comfortable position. "I can actually feel this couch giving me a disease."
She tries a laugh for him, but it's worn, threadbare.
He fixes his eyes on her right hand, waiting. The sharp sound of rain on metal reverberates through the room.
"I don't know how much longer I can do this," she murmurs, fingers still wrapped loosely around her gun as she stares out the window. Nothing but inky blackness and rivulets of rain streaming down the pane of glass.
His exhale snags in his lungs. "Do what?" he finally manages. He can't tell if this is something different, if she's thinking back to their argument in the car. They haven't really spoken to each other since, haven't done more than hummed and murmured half-broken sentences.
"I don't know. Run."
He waits on her, hopes she'll continue. The rain and the darkness and the coiled tension from the car are causing a different kind of energy to pour out of her, sharp and brutally honest.
"I can feel it, sometimes," she says, "every muscle and every bone in my body crying out to go back to Manhattan. To just – to make a stand. Wherever that leaves me."
The last time they discussed this, she kept running headlong into the battle and got herself damn near thrown off a roof. "You know what that stand would be," he chokes out.
"I do."
"Kate," he moans, feeling her words viscerally hit his stomach, a wave of nausea coursing through him. This is the second time today she's talked about staring down her death like this, with something too close to a calm acceptance.
"I don't want that," she murmurs. He stares at her, tries to keep the desolation from spreading into every facet of his being. "I don't. I just – I don't know how much longer I can keep running away. There's so much to investigate. There's so much to learn."
She wasn't built for running. Her fight-or-flight is just fight, just the omnipresent, reflexive desire to turn and make a stand. That instinct, that instinct paired with this disaster of her mother's case, is going to get her killed. "I wouldn't leave you," he says. "Your stand would be my stand."
She shakes her head. Puts the gun down carefully beside her, reaches her hand out to trail her finger gently over the top of his knee, then lets it rest there, lightly. "I won't let you die for me," she says, like that should be a comfort, like that should ease the horrible ache in his chest.
"You know it's not that," he murmurs, voice rasping across all the jagged, whirling possibilities, all the what ifs and almosts that her words are dredging up in him.
She twists her mouth into a wry smile at that. "I know."
"Just –" he reaches over, wraps his hands around her fingers that still rest against his knee, tries to leach some warmth and comfort into her cold skin. "I'm sorry," he finally says, can't get any further than that. Sorry the elusive words to make it right tangle in his throat. Sorry they're suddenly so at odds. Sorry for the constant tripping through routine, the exhausting, monotonous scratchy sheets and hours in the shaking Sentra and the way she has to suffocate every one of her instincts and flee because of a case that he opened up in the first place.
"We'll figure it out," she says, her voice suddenly laced with steel.
He hears it in her, the words she doesn't say. It's been a week. She's going to need something more than a half-formed plan to flee a step ahead of her would-be assassins. Hell, soon he's going to need more, too. "Yeah," he agrees, tugging her hand up to his mouth, dragging his lips along the back of her knuckles. She exhales, a long, shuddering sigh. "Not right now, though," he says, kissing the nail of her index finger, pulling the tip of it into his mouth, circling his tongue around it.
"Tomorrow," she husks, already canting toward him, the coiled energy in her body shifting, melting from a tense, caged panic to a deeper, needy hum.
He worries about both of them, worries that they won't be able to distract themselves with physicality forever, worries that they won't be able to sustain their constant flight, worries that, sooner or later, they'll both need to turn and fight, even if it's impossible, even if they'll almost certainly be destroyed.
She folds in over her legs, slides her body against his, skids her lips down the column of his throat. "Stop worrying," she growls into his neck, swinging a leg over his lap so that she's straddling him, her hands already slipping down his abdomen.
"Distract me," he gasps up against her when her fingers trail underneath the waistband of his boxers.
She hums an affirmation into his mouth as he runs his hands through her hair.
There are worse ways to keep from worrying.