Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.
It's pouring the day before they go to the city, and they're both buried in books. One of the things that Kate enjoys most about her enforced period of rest is reading. What she likes even more is talking with Castle about it. She's always been a bookworm, but a consuming job and a largely solitary private life had not only eaten into her reading time but restricted her ability to discuss books with someone.
It's almost one o'clock when she finishes A Tale of Two Cities. Ordinarily she'd be itching to talk with Castle about it, but she's getting itchy in other ways now. "Hey, Castle. You want to make that lava cake you promised me last week?"
"You bet," he says, standing up and stretching. "Want to help?"
"No. I wanna watch."
"Ah, a watcher, are you?"
"Under the right circumstances."
"Geez, Beckett, I haven't even turned the oven on yet and it's already heating up in here."
He's all but certain that Kate has a thing for his arms, specifically his muscles. He's seen her sneaking a peek when she thinks he's not looking—except that when it comes to her he's always looking; he's just gotten better at hiding it. She's on a stool now and he's standing opposite her, beating eggs and egg yolks into the chocolate batter. Though he'd found a hand-held electric mixer in a cabinet, he's deliberately using a whisk; his muscles are rippling in ways they wouldn't otherwise, and he tilts the bowl forward so that his forearms are angled steeply towards her.
"Watch out, your shirt," she says, pointing to the center of his chest. He'd opted for his yellow tee this morning to brighten up the gloomy day, but it's a bad choice for someone who's working with melted chocolate. There are flecks of it all over. The good news: it will come out in the wash. The better news: he can take his shirt off on the premise that he must work on the stains before they set in. The best news: he knows she'll love it.
"Hope you don't mind, Kate," he says, pulling the jersey over his head and tossing it in the sink. "Sorry to be half naked in the kitchen, but I've got to put some club soda on these spots."
"Right," she squeaks, another sound he hadn't known she had in her.
"Good thing we're going into the city tomorrow," he says, looking over his shoulder and then turning back to pour soda on the shirt. "I won't have to keep washing the same things, or worry about running out of clothes."
"Right," she squeaks again, shoving her trembling hands underneath the counter, but not before The Shirtless Chef notices.
TSC puts the six ramekins in the oven, sets the timer on his phone, and smiles. "These will be ready in fourteen minutes."
Her eyes are slewing between his pectoralis major and the oven door. "Right."
Three times "right." That's a record. He tidies up and is about to wash the bowl when he says, "Oh! Can't believe I forgot. Would you like to lick this?"
"Huh?"
"The chocolate that's left over. The little gooey smears I couldn't quite get off with a spatula."
Her mouth opens a fraction. Did he just say "get off with a spatula"? Overcome by a chocolatey smell, she suddenly realizes that Castle is offering her the batter bowl.
"Right."
Four!
"Still warm, Kate, but not too hot to lick. Just the way I like it."
"Me, uh, me. Same here. Too. Also."
Gotcha! He thinks as he puts the bowl down in front of her. "Help yourself," he says innocently. "Give it your best lick."
Calling on acting skills that she had previously restricted to the interrogation room, she feigns a coughing attack. "Water, please," she pseudo gasps. While he gets her something to drink she admires his back and tries to bring herself under control. God, she really, really needs to get better. Soon. When he gives her the water she drains the glass, then examines the bowl as if it were a priceless artifact before drawing the tip of her index finger across the bottom. "Yum. This is really good."
"Not half as good as the finished product, which will be ready in—three, two, one, now." Protecting his hands with potholders, he slides the ramekins from the oven and puts them on a cooling rack. "We have to eat these almost right away, okay?"
"No argument here, Castle."
He tips two of them out onto small plates and adds a scoop of vanilla ice cream to each. "For you," he says, pushing a plate and a fork across the table to her.
She's taking her third small bite from around the cakey rim when she hears his fork drop.
"No, no, no! You're eating it all wrong." He sounds horrified. "You can't nibble at the outside like that. You have to—" he leans over and pokes his fork into the middle of her cake. "You have to spear it, Kate. Spear it. So the hot liquid that's been building up in there gushes out all around the fork, see?"
She can hardly help seeing: it's a little chocolate stream, half oozing, half spilling from the cake. She's hypnotized.
"Isn't that fantastic, Kate? It's squirting."
Holy God, she's clenching her thighs so tightly she could burst a blood vessel. She can feel her face redden, and not from the heat that he'd released with his, his spear. "I didn't know cake could do that, Castle."
"You'd be amazed at what I can get my desserts to do."
Was that a wink? Did he just wink at her? "Hope I live long enough to find out," she mumbles.
"What's that?"
"Just said this was amazing enough for a lifetime."
"You ain't tasted nothin' yet. Wait 'til you have my kumquat mousse."
When she coughs this time, she's not faking it. And then she needs to change the course of the conversation. Immediately. "I meant to say, yesterday. That was really nice, your offering to get me a restraining order against Josh."
"I'm just glad you don't need it, after all."
"Still might. Just to protect myself from his raging ego. You know, in case I ever bump into him. Or it."
Castle lifts his head to look out the window, where rain is following hard on rain. "This weather is a drag. I think we should play a game."
A game? Isn't that what they've been doing? Playing an undeclared game of highly-charged cat and mouse? "We have some from when I was a kid. Clue, Monopoly. Oh, and Scrabble and Boggle. How about one of those?"
"I was thinking more like geography. You like that, right?"
"A geography game? We don't have one, sorry."
"Our own game. Of borders. We'll be crossing borderlines."
Oh, you bet we will, Castle. "How's it work?"
"I just invented it, but the rules are pretty simple. One person names a state or a country and the other has to come up with everything that shares a border with it. So if I say New York, the answer is New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont."
"And Canada."
"That's not a state."
"No, but last time I looked it was a country, so I should get a bonus."
Borderlines proves to be ruthless, right from the start (Colorado and Kazakhstan), because both players are wildly competitive. She's better on the countries, he wins on the states. "Wait till you have a kid in third grade, you'll know everything about every state," he says. "I have a real weakness for the state animals."
"There are state animals?"
"Of course. Some states have a bunch." He ticks them off: "Land mammal, sea mammal, wildlife animal, domestic mammal. Texas, Oklahoma, and Virginia have a state bat."
"A bat? Ewww. No, thanks. I'll just stick with dogs."
"You're in luck. There are twelve state dogs."
"How do you even know all this stuff, Castle?"
His expression changes in an instant, from half amused to utterly solemn. "I'm a dad, Beckett. I should know this stuff."
It's so unexpected and so touching that she almost weeps. "Alexis is a lucky girl."
"And I'm a lucky man. She doesn't care about any of that anymore, but I do."
"I can tell. How come?"
"Because," he says. "Because I hope that I'll need to know it all again some day."
They're quiet after that, and they both read their books until it's time for a late dinner, without dessert.
It's very early when they leave the next morning. Kate is anxious, not just about seeing her doctor and being on time for her 11:30 appointment, but about being back in the city. The noises. The pace. Everything. He asks her if she'd like to see Lanie or the boys and she says no. "Not even for a quick cup of coffee? Maybe lunch after you're through with Doctor Aronson?"
"No. No. I don't want to do any explaining. Answer all their questions. Or ask any."
"Ask—?"
"Like, 'Do you have anything yet on my shooter?' "
"Oh."
"I just want to be."
"Okay. Just us, then."
"Just us."
Between their early departure and her knowing every back road in four counties, they pull into a parking garage three blocks from her doctor's office with more than an hour to spare. She's more tightly wrapped every minute, and he wants to unwrap her. In more ways than one, but just one for now. He has two ideas: place, and line.
"I love this, Castle," she says, sliding into a booth in a cafe that's tucked into the corner of an old beer hall that's been converted to a home-furnishing store. "It looks like it's been here forever."
"It has, if by forever you mean 1902. In this city, that is forever. I found it about twenty years ago when I got caught in the rain and wanted somewhere to dry off and warm up." He arranges packets of sugar in an earthenware pot. "The coffee was great then and it still is."
He's dunking an almond biscotto, and she's still tense. "Don't you think the subways should have names?"
"What kind of names?"
"Well, like the N and the R, which you ride all the time. They're better than they used to be, but the service is till pretty terrible. So they should be called the Never and the Rarely."
"What about the Q?"
"Oh, that's the worst. Useless. The Quite Infrequent."
"I have a fave."
"A favorite subway line? How can anyone like the subway so much that they have a favorite?"
"It's the D. I've ridden it to four hundred and seventy-nine Yankee games. And it's where my parents met."
"Wait, you know how many times you've taken the subway to a baseball game?"
"Of course."
Of course she does. Duh. "And your parents met there? On the D train? How romantic. Or rodentic."
"It was romantic. My mom was about to go through the turnstile and realized she didn't have a token. She was in a huge rush to get to an exam and she was crazed. My dad was behind her and gave her his. And it turned out he didn't have his wallet so he had to walk thirty blocks. He ran into the room at the last possible moment, all sweaty, and there she was: they were going to the same exam, the LSATs. They were both applying to law school."
"A chivalrous pre-law student. Astonishing. So what would you call the D train?"
She smiles and looks into her cup. "Delightful."
"I don't think anyone else would."
"They don't have to. It's my name for my subway line."
"Who knows, Kate, I might change my mind about that dingy, derelict, decaying, delayed line, and cross over to your point of view."
"I'd like that. It's a good line to cross, Castle." She checks her watch. "Gotta go."
"I'll walk you there," he says, dropping a twenty on the table.
Four minutes later she disappears into the lobby of her doctor's building, but not before she promises to call him when she's ready to leave.
Kate has skimmed half a two-month old issue of People in the waiting room when the nurse tells her to go into the examining room. She doesn't bother to change into the flimsy paper robe because she's not here for that kind of an examination.
"Hi, Kate," the doctor says when she opens the door. "Wow, you look like a different woman than you did when I saw you a month ago."
"I am a different woman."
"Well, you've been through a hell of a lot, but I hope it doesn't change you too much. So, you wanted to talk to me about something urgent?"
TBC
A/N Thanks again for all your cheerfulness.