A/N: So lame I am at getting to individual answers to reviews - I totally suck, I know. You all rock however, dear readers - your kind words, wonderful encouragement, tweets, re-tweets - you have amazed me, made me laugh, made me cry in the best ways - and I am grateful - truly.
Chapter Sixteen: I let your words slip through my cracks.
Castle has no idea how much time passes until her sobs cease, but eventually Kate calms and then he feels her tense up a little within his embrace. Her tight clinging hold on him eases, and he doesn't know how he knows it - but he just gets this sense from her that she's feeling guilty now for the way she wrapped all around him.
Even though he was the one to initiate the contact, he would lay money on her thinking perhaps she's pushed too far, that she's taken from him more than he was really willing to give.
That's not at all how he feels.
And how he is feeling – frankly it surprises him.
He's been fighting so hard against his body's automatic reaction to her being in his life again; despising that he should still desire her so very fiercely. Earlier this very day he was struggling against it, having to hold himself so rigidly away from her it was taking everything that he had, and now both that self-loathing for wanting her, and the urge to battle against it have almost entirely slipped away.
And all because he hears her, feels empathy towards her once again – even if he still doesn't entirely understand.
The empathy is enough however, for him to freely offer her comfort ,while dulling all the desperate edge that any prior touch between them had. The burning desire is there, its always there - but he's able to push it down beneath the surface with an easy, all too familiar control that he hasn't recently had.
It's strange, so strange what he's feeling, there's almost calm inside him. Weird. He's still scared, and scarred, and reticent, and yet he feels more like himself in this moment - with her cradled against his chest, than he has at any time in this past year. Her brutally honest confession has altered his perceptions and his heart beats easier, its rhythm truer with that change.
Still, he doesn't fight it when Kate backs carefully out of his arms; he lets her go freely and merely waits to see what she'll do. His wife kneels on the rug before him and her hand tentatively comes up to rest against his cheek. Firelight illuminates her on one side, the setting sun streams through the windows behind her – she's painted so lovingly that his heart hitches in his chest, captivated. She blows out a cleansing breath and shyly attempts to send him a watery smile, he returns it without thinking.
"I know it must all still sound like excuses," she whispers. "And I know that I can't really claim to understand how very deeply I have hurt you, Rick. Or how much the way that I behaved just piled onto the hell you were in. I would give anything to go back . . . "
She pauses; closing her eyes closing around fresh tears. The dampness clings to her lush eyelashes, beading there un-falling. When she finds her voice once more, all her fierce determination, all her implacable will infuses what she says to him,
"I've made so many mistakes that you've been the one to pay most for, Castle. And so many times you've given me another chance. When you filed for divorce and I saw those papers, Rick - when I held them in my hands it was like I was waking up. I was working to get through the wall, back to you – but to my shame I only knew in that moment that I was taking it for granted that you'd be waiting. And I have no excuses for that,. I just wish I could convince you that, nothing could trigger who I am now into acting that way ever again. Forgive me – please, for taking so long to appreciate all that I still had to lose."
Castle swallows heavily. Does he wish that? Does he? Can he see any way to forgive her for her total abandonment of him, and work to put this behind them? Is it any sort of realistic possibility that they could try again?
He looks down at her, eyes scrunched closed, sorrow furrowing her brow. Every part of her posture is tense and repentant and he honestly doesn't know. He doesn't know and then it hits him that 'that', in itself – is a pretty big change. One small moment of open communication between them and he's moved from wanting her out of his life and leaving in him in peace to - 'I don't know'.
Wow.
Oh that scares him. It really does.
God knows he's barely survived this last year in her absence; every day a hard fight just to hang onto his sanity. Picking up each shard of his life and fitting the sharp, broken, brittle pieces back together has been agonizing. And all he's really accomplished is a semblance of a whole. What she's asking . . .
What if he takes that risk and she's wrong about how she's changed? If something happened, if she left him again - it would undo everything.
He knows he doesn't survive it if he let's her back in - only to lose her yet again.
"Kate, look at me," he asks softly, his hand coming up to cover hers where it rests against the plane of his cheek. Her slight fingers are cool, and beneath the engulfing warmness of his they shake slightly. "Your grief broke you, I can understand that," he says gently. "There is no worse grief in life, Kate, than losing what we did."
Her eyes flutter open, the hazel irises shrunken to tiny rims around a deep ocean of black distress. She looks up at him, clearly trying to search for positive affirmation somewhere in his face.
"But can you find it in yourself to forgive me for destroying the rest of our lives?" she whispers shakily. "I know I have no right to ask it of you, Castle. But I've also no choice but to beg it of you anyway."
The writer sighs.
"Are you asking me to forgive you, Kate, or are you asking me to give our marriage another chance?"
His voice is even and calm - though in truth he feels neither, and though he's sure of her answer - for reasons he can't fathom apparently he still wants to hear her actually say it.
Kate doesn't break eye contact at all.
"Both." She responds so quietly it's almost not a word at all, more half plea – half prayer. She offers it up with such longing in her eyes, such love - that it's almost enough to shred his remaining reserve right there.
The writer hesitates to answer though, knows that it's only fair to be plain. "I have no doubt of my ability to forgive you, Kate. Just feeling like I understand better what happened has diminished the pain."
Kate bites her lip, teeth digging into the plump flesh so hard it blanches beneath the strain.
"But . . ." she whispers.
Castle shakes his head.
"No, but."
"I don't understand."
He pulls her hand from his cheek and tangles their fingers together. An image flashes through his mind, how often he would do that as she lay beneath him and they moved in sync together. He has to shake his head slightly to clear it, looks at her only to find her staring at their intertwined digits and he wonders if what she sees is the same.
"I don't have an answer to the second part of your question," he says, his voice careful, low.
Her eyes dart straight to his, a little wild and a whole lot afraid, but he opens his face with raw honesty and then watches as understanding blooms first in her pupils, spilling then across the curves of her face. Her voice trembles with it and there is the barest blush of joy,
"So you're not saying, "No' then?"
The hope in her voice is really overwhelming, roughens his voice,
"I'm not."
"So what does the physiotherapist say?"
Kate watches as Castle moves with ease about the kitchen, the phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear as he checks in on his mother, via his daughter. The house here is always kept stocked with essentials and though they threw out together the perishables that Martha must have bought, there is enough to cobble them together a decent meal or two.
She'd figured he'd want to leave after right their earlier inspection – maybe that had been his original plan, but since they talked he seems determined to remain. And if he stays, she stays, that's the way she wants it, they've made a sort of start back, nothing more, but him acknowledging that he doesn't have answer to the question of their marriage seems big enough for now.
Leaving him to his conversation she pushes to her feet and wanders through the living room to the French windows that will lead her outside. Stepping out into the twilight she crosses the lawn without stopping for shoes, the plush grass soft as it always is against the soles of her feet. When Kate can see the ocean more clearly, she stops and lets the coming night envelop her, shifting her gaze skywards after a moment she searches for the early stars.
This is a small, but a real change.
There is strange sensation stirring in her and she wants to analyze it because the panic that's been rising inexorably, the unraveling that the approaching date threatened to bring – its still there, but now she's discovering defenses. She's infused with a new strength to stand against the tornado of emotions and manage to keep her life firmly planted in the ground.
Castle has done that.
When he listened to her, when she was finally able to let all that struggle out, spit it up and offer it to him – inadequate though it is, to witness the pain lessening in his eyes and see understanding shimmer there instead, such a gift.
No guarantee. No commitment, but no 'No' either.
And his smile, his beautiful, tentative but real smile - for her, pulled from him unconsciously as he mirrored hers.
Kate stares at the heavens and pictures their son there. She imagines that he watches over them, pulls for them, and before she knows what's she's doing she's whispering to him on the ocean breeze,
"I love your father, Jack. I love him so very desperately. So help me baby, help me stay strong now when your leaving threatens to break me, make me run towards him instead of away."