Notes: I'm going to try to be minimalist in recapping episode details while still providing context to let you know the when and where. This chapter picks up just after 2x06 "Vampire Weekend."

Oh, yeah, and I think Stana Katic gets credit for naming the prop "Margot." See this link (replace dots and slashes and remove spaces): https: slashslash twitter dot com slash Stana_Katic slash status slash 192488797320134656 slash photo slash 1

Part Four: Enjoy the Party

The energy in the loft was winding down after a fair share of excitement, not the least of which was Beckett backing up in laughter over something hilarious that Lanie had said, only to crash into Edgar Allan Poe and his glass of red wine.

She'd whirled around to find him blinking his eyes open, wiping the drops from his whiskers, and glancing down to assess the new stain on the shirt beneath his dark coat.

Before she'd even had the chance to apologize, Lanie chased Beckett with some paper towels, dabbing at her back and triumphantly declaring the black trench coat undamaged, while Castle relegated the raven on his arm to the snacks table and wandered off.

As the crowd dwindled, they found each other again, and she did get to apologize, which he brushed off rather graciously. Nevertheless, something made her stick it out and watch as more and more of the guests called it a night. When he escorted the last of them to the door, he turned around to see his mother and Beckett chatting near the kitchen.

"And then there were three," he announced.

Martha sighed. "I'm afraid another one bites the dust, kiddo." She stretched her arms and removed the oversized hat from atop her two-tone Cruella hair. Her broad, dramatic gestures did not quite betray exhaustion, but her voice was appropriately weary. "Ah! I think I'll sleep like the dead tonight." She winked at her son, smiled at Kate, and wished them both a very good night and a happy Halloween.

They reciprocated the sentiments, and Castle's gaze fell to his sole remaining guest. She had left her coat open, but detached the green creature, retiring it from its post on her costume and placing it on the counter. Castle inwardly kicked himself for missing the moment that she'd removed it.

"I'm sorry about the wine," she said firmly, as though she hadn't said it an hour ago. "Ruining your costume."

"Don't be," Castle insisted. "I think a bloodstain suits Poe. It's an improvement."

She laughed despite herself.

He gestured to the decorative spring on the counter, trying in vain not to picture it dangling off her hip inside her open coat instead. "Where'd you get—that—anyway?"

She finger-combed the creature's sparkly, silver hair. "You mean Margot?"

Castle didn't even bat an eye at the fact that the creature had a proper name. "Yeah," he said with a grin. "Did you put that together especially for me?"

Her eyes caught the light and her lips curled into her quirky smile—the one that said she was ready to parry with him. "No, it's just something I had lying around."

He looked at her, Margot-less and entirely plain-clothed, and chuckled: "I still can't believe you didn't wear a real costume."

"Just showing you another side of myself, Castle." It was out before she could censor it. Her smile disappeared instantly, and she fumbled her way into a change of subject. "Alexis still hasn't left her room?" she asked lamely, her shift into a more defensive posture upstaging the genuine concern.

It was a true fumble, because Castle picked up the ball and ran with it. "You weren't going to come tonight, were you?" He studied her face to gauge the reaction that she would be unlikely to voice aloud.

Sure enough, she didn't answer, but her halfhearted smile gave her away.

He couldn't restrain himself or the curiosity in his eyes. "What changed your mind?"

"Besides the chance to prank you?" she volleyed.

"Besides that—if," he said, pausing tentatively, "if there is another reason."

I got the official offer. . . . I haven't accepted it yet. . . .

. . . Is there a reason why you wouldn't?

They were always dancing around one another, beckoning each other to be the first to cave to uninhibited self-expression. But all of this verbal dancing only left a circle of scuffmarks at their feet. It never took them anywhere.

And why should that change tonight?

Maybe it was only fair for him to put her on the spot now after she had just recently done the same to him at his book launch party. But that didn't mean that she had to answer any more cooperatively than he did.

He'd acted as though her wellbeing depended upon his presence or something. You'd be okay if I didn't write another Nikki Heat?

So she took a page out of his book and deflected back to him. "Please. Why else would you have invited me?" Her tone was just light enough to convince him not to divulge a sincere response—and he had plenty of them.

It didn't matter, though. Even if she really didn't have any other reason for donning a puppet and a trench coat and wandering to his loft after nine o'clock at night, the possibility that a single prank was worth all that effort meant something to him.

It meant she wanted to play.

He smiled, picked up Margot from the countertop, and closed in on Beckett's personal space. "Here."

She took a breath as his fingers swept lightly against her abdomen to affix Margot to the cloth at her hip. She knew that the touch was utilitarian, but it felt intimate if only because they so rarely touched each other—especially there—and maybe just a little bit because she was picking up on his I've invited you to bed before and the offer still stands vibe.

And yet he was so gentle, so careful to touch only as much as was necessary to complete the practical task. Well, other than poking the creature's little red nose to see the goofy accessory bob its head.

Castle was the first to look up, but she met his eye, and he said softly, "Now you're yourself, Kate." It was too honest, too intimate a statement for either of their comfort, so he covered with: "It suits you, you know." This side of you. His thought was unvoiced, but it shone in his eyes; his attempt at a cover was no less honest and no less intimate.

Beckett modestly ducked her head and walked toward his front door, taking the opportunity to break eye contact, even as she glanced at him trailing behind her. But instead of giving him the satisfaction of their unspoken communications, she chose to interpret the too-true statement in a way that would allow their companionable banter to kick in. "It's not too Aliens? Creepy things busting out of my guts?"

"Nah," he chuckled, seeing her through the doorway. "Just Aliens enough."

"I'll see you Monday," she said, her tone clearly casual lest it sound too much like a date or, worse yet, a promise she looked forward to keeping.

"Yeah," he managed, effectively struck dumb anyway. "I'd better—" He jutted his thumb over his shoulder and tilted his head in an I-should-be-going-the-opposite-direction sort of gesture. "Yeah. Sleep."

But Castle couldn't sleep, his entire being alight with electricity. As soon as he closed the door behind her, he turned around to face his loft and momentarily forgot all about changing out of his costume and getting to bed.

He washed dishes. He gathered trash. He tidied the tabletops. He swept the floors. Their cleaning lady, Alicia, was coming tomorrow. He was a pro at scheduling major events just before her visits—so much more valuable than having her come clean the place before the crowd, especially when half the decorations were fake cobwebs, anyway. The cleaning lady was coming tomorrow, and he cleaned the entire common space of the loft. He just couldn't stop himself.

Time may have flown particularly fast because he was singing. He was singing.

"A ma-a-a-an's gotta do what a man's gotta do," he crooned into an aerosol microphone. He whipped a dishtowel around and began to serenade an open bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape on the kitchen counter: "Seems destiny ends with me saving you. . . ." He slammed the towel onto the counter and swiped up the wine bottle in a valiant rescue maneuver before sealing it with a stopper to preserve the wine.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, Martha stood at the top of the stairs, listening to her son bustle about the loft in all of his melodic glory. Smiling, she simply returned to her room to let him entertain himself into a productive stupor. Yes, she decided with pleasure, her only son had certainly inherited her theatrical flair.

Sunday morning found Kate sitting in a deep red armchair in a quiet corner of a bustling café. Her vanilla latte was nearly finished and very nearly cold, untouched since about page 14 of her no-longer-very-spontaneous prose.

Heat and Rook were on the case.

Were, as in the past tense (was it just Kate, or were fictional homicides suddenly more difficult to solve?). For no particular reason that she would be willing or able to articulate, the storyline with the murder investigation had stalled, and in the meantime, Heat and Rook had found themselves inexplicably staking out a mansion in some undisclosed location.

Kate figured she should probably know something about this place, being the writer and all. Yet as soon as she identified herself with that word—that word—even in a passing thought, she ignored any imposing "instinct" about what she should or should not be doing. Besides, in her experience, writers didn't seem to have that much regard for rules anyway.

She found him in the wine cellar. "There you are," she said with a smile that was both hungry and satisfied. As though accentuating the fact that they were entirely alone, Detective Heat kicked the door closed behind her with the heel of her boot, never breaking their eye contact.

"How did you find me?"

"WWJRD," she replied: "What Would Jameson Rook Drink? And we're out of tequila, so. . . ." She gestured to the casks of wine.

"Are you drawing a comparison here to Jesus? Because I can have you calling out to God in a minute."

"Only a minute?"

He grinned, and she could tell he was sizing her up. "Judging by the look on your face? Yes."

"You're so cocky, Rook."

She was surprised that he simply responded: "I stand by my estimate."

Nikki closed in on him, crowding him without touching him. "What makes you think that's how this is going to go in the first place?"

He stood his ground, clearly resisting every impulse to grab her right then and there. "How is this going to go, Nikki?"

She liked to lead, and she was enjoying his restraint. But it seemed just as much fun to pretend that she wasn't about to take charge; to pretend that they were making some kind of mutual discovery. "Let's find out," she whispered at his ear.

Rook was caught up in her proximity and her scent. "You smell like cherries," he said.

Her only response was to lean into him for a deep, wet kiss. Their hands trailed along each other's faces and down their bodies as they tasted one another. Nikki pulled back; pulled her shirt over her head, slipping out of the sleeves before Rook could take advantage of her preoccupation. She needn't have worried. Before he knew what was what, she pulled down her own bra straps and undid the clasp. She pressed her bare skin to Rook while she opened his leather belt and tugged his dress shirt loose to the tune of his groaning anticipation. Then Nikki reached beneath his waistband, finding him—

A smug voice from behind her broke into her thoughts: "Stroking your ego?"

Kate leapt out of her skin. Barely recovering, she slammed the notebook shut on her lap and turned her body just enough to face the man who had come up behind her to lean in just behind her ear. "What are you doing here?"

"Given everything we know of one another," said Vince, straightening his posture and rocking back on his heels, "I think it's a more pertinent question to ask what you're doing here."

Her eyes widened in realization and she glanced around the room. "Is—is this your—?"

"No," he said. With a handful of pastry, he gestured to the red armchair beside hers. "May I?" he asked, but he didn't bother to wait for permission before plopping down.

"You run a coffeehouse," she said, as though reminding him. "Why would you go out to a café?"

He pointed to the pastry in his other hand as though the answer were already obvious. "Don't have Danishes at our coffeehouse."

"You could start selling them." By now she sounded like she wanted to get rid of him, and frankly, she did. "Reasonable thing to find at one, isn't it?"

"But then I wouldn't have a good reason to stop in at someone else's café." Vince grinned. "And run into the kinds of writers who prefer cafés to coffeehouses."

She scoffed, "I am not a writer—"

"—who is not-writing right now," he finished for her. "I see that, yes."

Kate narrowed her eyes at him, but he was too busy taking a big bite of Danish to be affected.

He had just barely swallowed when he asked, "Did you know the Danish actually has Austrian origins?"

"Really?" she said, feigning interest with the thought that it might just make him leave sooner.

"There it's called 'Plundergebäck.' Great name, right? Just say it once; you'll be hooked. Plundergebäck. Plundergebäck. I can never say it just once," he laughed, but sobered quickly at her unchanged expression. "Anyway, some Austrian bakers made it in Denmark, and the Danes eventually tweaked it and made it a specialty. So we called it Danish, but they called it Wienerbrød, for Vienna."

She shook her head slowly, her lips pursed together in both bemusement and impatience. "Is nothing sacred?" she teased, the humor tempered with surprisingly less sarcasm than she might have intended.

"What are you working on?" he asked, switching gears without warning, and suddenly Kate wished he would teach her more about pastry history. 'Is nothing sacred?' indeed. Seeing her hesitation, he added: "Or playing with? You know, if it's not work, per se."

"It's—not. It's not really anything."

"Poetry, fiction, nonfiction . . . Could be anything," he said, as though reading her and not discerning many details. "But there's a story in your eyes—no doubt about that."

"Really?" Kate snorted. "Because the story fell off the tracks at least five pages ago." Damn, she thought. She definitely had to brush up on her poker face if she intended to get back in the box with a suspect anytime soon. Maybe scribbling words à la stream-of-consciousness all morning was getting her in the habit of saying more than she should. Where was a censor when she needed one?

But while she was schooling her features and vowing to be more careful, Vince was already answering her like what she'd said was no big deal, like she'd told him that she was getting a cold and he was giving her the rundown on rest and fluids. "Ah," he said. "That's no problem. At this point, there's a few ways you can go about it. You can revisit your vision of the overall story and look at what seems to be slowing it down or derailing it. You can free-write to see if a different story may be emerging. . . ."

He sat there with her for a short while, advising her, guiding her, anticipating very reasonable questions before she even voiced them. By the time his tone and body language hinted that he was winding down, Kate couldn't recall just how much of the conversation she had actually initiated, because part of her honestly was wrapped up in this world he'd created for her in which she was some sort of storyteller with something worth putting on paper.

"So, what do you say?" He gestured to the closed notebook still resting on her lap. "You ready to give it another go?"

"I don't know," she groaned, exasperated despite the wisdom she'd been handed, or perhaps suddenly burdened with it. "I wouldn't do this."

She thought she meant that she wouldn't write (and God, why was she writing?),but Vince had already accepted that her writing was now a given and simply thought that she wouldn't do whatever she was writing—none of which he'd seen. She never volunteered it, and he never asked.

"It's not about what you would do," he said, and he stood to leave, as though his parting advice would be so simple and all-encompassing that she would have no questions. He smiled, gave a little shrug. "It's about what your characters would do. Just put them together and enjoy the party."

"Oh," was all Kate could say, watching him go without so much as a goodbye from either of them.

So far Nikki Heat was enjoying the party a little too much.

But then, Kate wasn't exactly about to end it.