Chapter Eighteen: Just let me kiss you anywhere it hurts.
When Kate wakes up, it's later than she normally sleeps these days. The guest room is dull around her, grey light filtering in through the gauzy curtains that cover the expensive oak slatted blinds she'd left open purposely.
As her senses sharpen with wakefulness she hears both the cries of gulls and the steady patter of rain on the house's roof, the plaintive calls blending perfected into what she knows must be a damp and overcast Hampton's morning. Somehow that, and the strangeness of waking in a room she's never used, in a home she's called her own for years, leaches away the sense of lightness she'd felt just the night before and she's left feeling hollowed out and unsettled in the wake of it. She hasn't shared a bed with Castle in a year and yet it seems she's never been more conscious of that than this morning, waking up here.
Sitting up and swinging her legs out of bed, Kate stands and then pads barefooted to the window. Pulling back the curtains, she takes in the sight of the lush lawn at the rear of the property, and beyond it the huge and currently empty expanse of beach. She's spies a lone figure standing by the water's edge, stock still and staring at the horizon, the height and breath of the silhouette tells her instantly that it's her husband.
Castle was never one to be up early.
She thinks he looks pensive and brooding out there all by himself, though of course all she can see his back from here, but it enforces the sense of unease that she's awoken with. It reminds her that this is the very last morning they have before they really are a full revolution around the sun away from who they used to be, and the sight of him so alone out there in the rain is disturbing. It twists something inside her that strengthens her resolve and Kate turns from the window in a hurry now - desperate to dress and to go out there so she can be with him.
Rick breathes the slightly humid, salty sea air into his lungs greedily. There's something about standing next to the ocean that has always reminded him of eternity. The endless pattern of the waves beating against the sand in a cadence as old as the planet herself, it speaks to him, calms his spirit. It's ever been that way, and he's in dire need of that calming effect this morning.
He did not sleep well last night. Tossing and turning for hours before he'd finally fallen into a fitful sleep, and then dreamed with an eerie almost waking clarity. Nightmares plagued him. He'd emerged from them more than once, gasping into the darkness with the echoes of Kate's screams from the year before still ringing in his ears.
He'd reached out for her each time, (and that's something he'd finally stopped doing some months ago), only to be reminded by the empty expanse next to him that she wasn't sleeping there. And it had actually felt weird - probably because he knew that she was in the house – for him to be in the familiar bed, yet all alone.
He'd almost; almost gone in search of her around 4am - just so that he could get some rest, but his pride just wouldn't let him. In the end he'd settled for simply getting up with the dawn and coming down to the beach instead, hopeful that the ocean could work her usual magic on him, center his being as she eased his fears.
An hour or so later and Castle does feel better - even if he's not very rested, and he's thankful that events have conspired to get him away from New York and bring him out here. The loft would be far too much to deal with right now, as it is the writer can already feel the grief swelling within him; the coming marker of Jackson's passing forcing him right back to the terrible bleakness of that morning once again.
Time - they say, heals all wounds. But Castle can't help but think that though time may dull its sharp teeth; this date in June is just always going to be hell.
Turning his face up towards the light rain that's falling, Castle lets it wash over his face as he breathes it in. It feels soft and almost gentle, like the sky is crying, the wet caress as subtly persistent as his agony.
He's thinking about perhaps taking a long walk in it as he stands there, and then he hears them, quiet footfalls approaching across the damp sand, and Rick doesn't have to open his eyes to know that Kate's found him.
Her husbands' face is wet from the rain, his hair darkened and plastered to his head just as his t-shirt and sweatpants are plastered to his skin. As Kate approaches him it becomes evident that it's clearly been some time that he's been standing out here. He doesn't move as she approaches, he just keeps his head turned up towards the sky like maybe he's praying, so she comes to a stop a few feet away and silently waits on him.
"How did you sleep?" he asks, breaking the silence suddenly and dropping his head back to its usual position, he turns his ocean colored eyes towards hers.
She wants to tell him that she slept well, and she did, but the bruise-like shadows she can see under his vivid eyes halt the words before they ever make it off her lips.
"You don't look like you slept at all, Castle," she says instead. The words are laced with gentle concern, and she steps closer, her hand coming up to glide softly over his cheekbone before she can over think it. His skin is a little chilled beneath the slide of her fingertips, even though the rain isn't actually cold and the June day is mild despite it.
Her husband stands still until Kate drops her hand away, then he shrugs lightly,
"Just bad dreams," he replies, and it's almost nonchalantly, like he's really trying to dismiss them as nothing lest it should become clear how very much is already weighing on him today.
But it's not as if she can't guess exactly what terrors were hounding him so Kate opts to carry on as if he's just admitted it.
She's reins in the automatic, 'I'm sorry', before it escapes her mouth, and focuses instead on something that might actually help him, help them both, namely the only plan she has which is to keep right on forcing herself to be open with him.
"I haven't dreamt of it recently," she admits, her eyes full of worries as they remain steadily on his. "You'd think I would, wouldn't you? You'd think it would plague me. And what's worse is that each morning when I wake and I've slept without dreaming of it - I feel so guilty."
Castle watches her silently, assessingly for a long moment.
"Did you dream about it in the beginning?" he asks at length, and there's no judgment in his face that she can see, just his natural curiosity.
Kate nods, finding that she's strangely relieved that he's asking.
"Walk with me?" she asks, tilting her head up the beach towards the breakwater. Castle smiles faintly in reply and then falls in step beside her, close but not touching and his hands disappear quickly and with an obvious awkwardness into his pockets.
They cover fifty feet or so of the beach before she answers him.
"At first, and then for a couple of months I dreamt of it every night without fail," she confesses in a small voice whose steadiness successfully masks how devastating that was for her. "I'd wake up screaming, pleading, crying hysterically, and then I'd switch off. Go numb for the rest of the day."
She looks at him sideways under her eyelashes, "And what about you, Rick?"
Beside her he tenses, his previously even paces faltering slightly. Taking a deep breath he returns her sideways glance and gives just the smallest shake of his head. "Actually I'd always dream I was searching for you, "he says. "I wouldn't dream about what had actually happened - that Jack had died. I'd just dream you were gone, and then I'd wake up looking for you and it would hit me it was true. I'd go up to the nursery and it would be empty, everywhere was empty. These dreams of you screaming for him are new."
They walk on in silence for the next few minutes, Kate trying digest that information and gather herself and Castle holding in so many things he wants to ask her that he hasn't been able to this last year.
"You know," he says at length. "Once I knew you were seeing Dr. Burke again, Kate, those dreams got less frequent. Knowing that you were seeing him, it made things better."
Her eyes snap to his.
"It did? How did you even know?" she asks.
"Lanie," he confesses gently. "Lanie's been begging me from the beginning to just give you time, Kate. The boys have too. Right up until what would have been Jackson's first birthday even."
Kate stops dead in her tracks, but Castle continues a few paces ahead before he almost reluctantly turns back to face her.
His wife's eyes are huge in her suddenly pale face; clearly the fact that her friends have been continually championing her to him is news. "Up until Jack's birthday . . ." she repeats.
The writer nods slightly, "I haven't actually spoken to any of them since," he admits, and there's almost shame in his face as he says it, but anger and hostility flaring in his eyes as well. Obviously he's become estranged from their friends and it bothers him, and he's unsure of where to place the blame for this.
Kate frowns. "That was four months ago," she whispers to him.
Castle nods again. "Yep, the final time that I came by the precinct in some last ditch attempt to get you to speak to me," he says somewhat bitterly. "For all the good that it did me."
If he says more at this point she stops hearing it, because oh God, how she remembers that day.
She'd been greeted by awkwardness and empathy everywhere she went. All her colleagues had seemed so very surprised to see her working. Her partners had been hyper vigilant and sweetly over protective, and Gates had simply forced her to stay away from any fresh cases, benching her with paperwork the entire day.
She'd been lost, overwhelmed, and highly conscious of the fact that the same day the prior year had been the happiest of her existence. Desperate, she'd needed to work like she'd never needed to work before. She'd known she could only get through by filling her mind with anything else until the day was over. And when Castle had shown up . . . God, even now it's almost too much for her to recall it.
He'd staggered out of the elevator, unshaven and red-eyed, completely disheveled mid-afternoon. He'd spied her and called for her, and she'd dared one look- one single look at his beautiful, desperately unhappy face and she'd fled. She'd gotten up from her desk, and run. From him, from the precinct – she doesn't even remember exactly how she ended up at her apartment, but she can still recall the cold, solid weight of her gun in her hand.
So very close she came that day. Four months of tiny progress with Dr, Burke had entirely washed away beneath the certain knowledge that she would never be able to be happy again.
And then it had come to her - that one look that she'd stolen at his face, and the memory of his agony had stilled her finger on the trigger. It had made her get up and put the gun safely away.
She'd called Dr. Burke and she'd gone to see him as an emergency and somehow she's managed slow but steady steps forward from there.
The memories fade from her mind and Castle comes back into view. He's watching her silently. Kate crosses the few steps between them, she stares up into his watchful face and wants nothing more than to confess to it all. But she's terrified that he'll be more weighed down by how close she came to suicide - than lifted by seeing that he was all that stayed her hand on that day. The time will come, it will come and one day she'll explain every part of it to him, but this will have to be enough for now,
"You were with me that day," she tells him, "even though I ran from you, Castle. You were there. And I know how hard that must sound to believe. But seeing you then - that's when I started back, I think. It was a turning point for me, and I'm so grateful."
Clear eyed, the cop holds out her hand to him, waiting.
The writer hesitates, but only fractionally. Slowly he pulls his right hand from his pocket and then he gently accepts the gesture that she's offering.
Kate wraps her slender fingers around his broad, stronger ones and feels another part of herself come home. She tugs him forward then, and together they continue to silently walk the beach.