Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

"Orgasmic food, huh?" he says, trying not to choke, grateful that he has nothing in his mouth.

"Just ask the owners of Harry Meets Sally, your favorite store in Williams. I'm sure they can quote chapter and verse." She beams at him. "So to speak."

He will control himself. He will sit calmly and find a word to play, preferably nowhere near hers—he can't even look at that inflammatory string of letters—and he will put his tiles on the board and announce his score and add it to the tally and he really doesn't care if he just makes "it" or "no," he just needs to get through this Godforsaken game. Oh, here's a distraction, he can get up for the coffee in a minute. Get up maybe is not a good thought. He can go get the coffee in a minute. He plays "and" for four points and she's clearly shocked. "Gonna get our coffee," he says, temporarily abandoning the table for the kitchen, where he very, very slowly retrieves two mugs, two spoons, and a pitcher and sets them on a tray. As laboriously as he can, he cuts two slices of watermelon, drops them in two bowls, and adds them to the tray. Then he wraps the melon as if it were a fragile item he had to ship overseas, and returns it to the fridge.

At long last, though not nearly long enough for him, he carries the tray to the table. "Here you are," he says, presenting her with both melon and coffee. "Did you play?"

"Of course. You were gone for at least ten minutes."

"Gross exaggeration. Let me see." She'd done well, getting twenty-two points by using three common letters to make "ion" but attaching it to "barre" to make "barren," with the N on a double-word space. "Nice. And you got rid of some junky letters, too."

"Thanks," she says, slurping noisily on the watermelon.

He looks carefully at his letters. And looks again. Thank you, Lady Luck. He has a C and the K; experience tells him to save them to use together, when he can play them to much better advantage. But experience isn't everything in this game, and it definitely isn't tonight. Tonight's game, after what she did, is about revenge. And right now, revenge is as sweet as chocolate lava cake. Maybe sweeter. Her "ion" is there, beckoning him, luring him. Who knew that that superficially harmless little word could be so seductive? With a passive expression, he attaches five letters to the front of "ion." Mmmmmm. The low score is irrelevant: this play is priceless. "Thirteen points," he says.

"Move your arm, Castle, I can't see your word."

"Oh, sorry, it's 'erection'."

He can see how hard she's working not to laugh, but he's her equal in that game, too. He locks eyes with her. She doesn't make a sound. "Beckett?" he asks, without losing eye contact.

"Yes?" Her eyes don't move, either.

"It's your turn."

"Your mind is totally in the gutter, Castle."

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."

"Your word."

"My word? There's nothing gutterish about it, although like 'gutter' it's a word common in the building trade. It's a simple one. 'The museum was erected in nineteen oh three.' I used the noun form of the verb 'to erect'. You played 'ion' and I seized the opportunity to make a longer word of it. To build on it. So if, as you claim, my mind is in the gutter, I believe that you're the provocateur, what with that and your earlier, ah, earlier entry. The big O."

She can't hold hold out any longer. "You win," she says, collapsing in laughter. "You win."

When her laughter trails off, he begins to hum.

She looks sideways at him, shakes her head, and begins to laughs all over again. "Yeah, yeah, Castle. I get it. 'Sweet, Sweet Surrender'."

"That's right, music to my ears, Kate."

"I think we did something here."

"What did we do?"

"We crossed the Scrabble line."

"Is that even a thing?"

"It is now, bud."

"Duly noted." Also duly noted, but tacitly, is the drop of watermelon juice at the corner of her mouth. It's sitting there, pink and glistening. He'd surrender his Ferrari if he could lick that off her, but he can't, so he talks to her. "You know what I really love, Kate? I really love seeing you laugh. When I got here you could barely chuckle without being in agony." She's smiling just a little, and the drop of watermelon juice is still there. He leans across the Scrabble board and brushes two fingertips over it. "You had." He has to clear his throat. And his mind. "You had a little bit of watermelon juice. Right there."

"I do? I mean, did?"

"Yeah. Gone now."

She reflexively puts her hand to the very spot where his had just been. It feels so warm. Suddenly she stands up—faster than she ever has since before the shooting. "Oh, my God. I didn't do my PT today. We left so early and then I took a nap and everything. And dinner. And stuff. I have to do it. Right now. Sorry. Okay?"

"Of course it's okay. But are you sure? It's late."

"I have to. It's my schedule. I have to stick to my schedule. It's important. Really, really important."

While he puts things in the dishwasher and cleans up the kitchen, he marvels at her determination and recalls a conversation they'd had not long after he'd arrived here, when she told him how independent she'd always been. "When my mother tried to show me how to tie my shoes I had a tantrum. Wanted to do it all by myself." He can picture a pint-sized Kate struggling with the laces, determined to get it. The way she's determined now, twenty-five years later, only this is one hell of a lot bigger than a little girl and her sneakers.

Since she's still doing her exercises, he ducks into the bathroom, washes his face, brushes his teeth, and heads for bed and his laptop. He's left the door slightly ajar because he wants to be able to hear her if she calls him for something. A while later—he has no idea how long, but long enough for him to have written more than 700 words of his new chapter—it's not her voice that he hears but her feet. Or the absence of her feet. The stopping of her feet. It sounds as though she stopped and is standing right outside his door. Nah, he must be imagining it. He types a few more sentences and hears, or thinks he hears, his name, and he looks up.

"Castle, are you awake?" The question is scarcely a blip on the decibel scale. If he weren't a father who's still attuned to hearing a baby cry from the other end of the apartment, even though his baby is now 17 years old, he probably wouldn't have known that she'd said anything.

"Of course. Come on in."

There's another silence, followed by another low-decibel question. "Could you come out here?"

Could he come out there? Does the sun rise in the east? Is the ocean salty? Yes. Yes. Yes. He's out of bed and opening the door before her request—it is a request, isn't it?—has finished charging the air. "Kate? Is something wrong?"

Dear God, she thinks, here he is. Look at him. His hair is sticking up, he's wearing a tee shirt that says SO HAPPY in bright blue letters, and boxers with rubber duckies printed all over them. How is it possible for anyone to look that cute and that sexy at the same time? He's like a little boy and a big man—apparently a very big man—all in one. Maybe this isn't a good idea. Her knees are a little wobbly. She's a little sweaty.

"Do you feel all right? Kate?" His hand is almost at her rib cage, just short of touching her.

"I do. I'm fine." She takes a moment before continuing. "I was just wondering if I could kiss you goodnight. Out here. In the hall."

It's not often that he prays late at night, but he is now. Praying that he's not dreaming this. She looks so sweet and serious. Tentative but confident at the same time. "Uh, we're not crossing the line, right? The line, capital T, capital L?"

"No, not ready for that. This is another line. About another kind of line." She inhales deeply. "I've been drowning for such a long time, since I was nineteen, before I was an adult."

She'd been looking at him, but now she moves her head slightly, as if she sees something behind him, and her eyes cloud over. He has no idea where she's going with this, but she wants to kiss him, so—.

"I'd come to the surface for a while, and start for shore, and then something would drag me under again. Sometimes I didn't want to fight my way back up, you know? Even if the water was cold or choppy or filthy. But for the past couple of years, something—someone—has kept pulling me out, getting me back to dry land, throwing me a lifeline, being my lifeline."

She pauses, and now she's looking at him again, up at him. He's still not quite used to that, but she hasn't been wearing heels out here, and without them she's several inches shorter than he.

"That's you, Castle. I want you to know that, that you've been my lifeline. That you are my lifeline."

He's not a drowning man, because a drowning man is frightened and desperate and often without hope. But his lungs seem to belong to a drowning man, because they feel as if they're about to explode. He finds that he can't speak. She's made this astonishing, life-changing declaration, and he can't speak. Most of his energy is directed to getting air; the rest, to keeping tears away.

"I wanted you to know that before I kiss you goodnight. If it's okay that I kiss you goodnight?"

He still can't talk, but he nods his head so vigorously that he almost pulls a muscle.

Kate comes very close to him and cradles his face with her hands, the heels meeting just beneath his jaw. She gradually moves them up until she can stroke his cheekbones with her thumbs, then takes them away to run her right thumb across his lips. He can't believe how gentle it is. He can feel her breath, but she's not kissing him yet. "Thank you, Castle," she says quietly. "Thank you. Thank you." He wants to say thank you right back, but his voice has abandoned him.

But when her mouth covers his, things are not so gentle. The tip of her tongue is pressing hard and harder against his lips, and he opens them. Though he's completely concentrated on her, he's also hyper aware of their surroundings: the grain of the wooden floor against his bare feet, the mingled scent of toothpaste and soap and the pines outside the open windows. And then that vanishes, and he's aware of nothing but her. It's all her, her tongue moving deep inside his mouth, her fingers digging in to his scalp, her thumbs at his temples. When they had kissed a few weeks ago, he could feel her nipples tightening against his chest, but now her breasts are full against it. He's longing to take his hands out of her gorgeous hair and skate them under her tee shirt and caress those perfect breasts, to take them in his mouth even though it would mean having to leave her mouth—her wet, warm mouth and its darting, slicing, slicking, curling tongue that is doing indescribable things to him. But he can't do that, not yet, and so he leaves his hands where they are and sinks deeper into the kiss.

She'd asked him to come out in the hall because it's neutral territory, neither his nor hers, and because the temptations anywhere else—the living room with its sofa, the bedrooms with their beds—are too great. Earlier today she had given herself permission to fall in love with him, but she needs everything to be right, and here is not the place and this is not the time for the next step. But she wants him to know how close she is. He's moving against her, kissing her ear and her neck, moaning into her mouth, and it's all she can do not to say, "Take me against the wall, Castle, right now, take me." She can feel how fast his heart is beating, how they match each other pulse for pulse, can feel him hot and hard and harder against her, and she knows what it's costing him to hold back for her.

And so she backs off, says, "Goodnight, Castle," and starts to leave.

She has gone only two steps when he reaches out, grabs her hand to stop her, and puts his palm over her cheek. "You're my lifeline, too," he says. "You know that, don't you?" He swallows, steadies his voice. "Thank you for saving me from drowning." He drops his hand and they both turn, he to his room and her to hers.

"Goodnight, Kate," he says from his doorway.

"Night, Castle," she answers from hers. And she gets into bed and pulls the sheet over her and whispers into the dark, "I love you."

TBC