Chapter 15 – Epilogue (Part 3)

Previously...

Before Castle could compute what was happening, Kate had switched seats, collapsing into his lap, her arm loosely slung around his shoulders and her legs carelessly draped over his thighs.

"One more for the road," Kate told the amused barman, waving the check away and flashing her room key instead so he could continue to serve them.

It was going to be a long night.

Kate was still sitting in his lap when the waiter returned with their final round of drinks. The round that would signal their evening, in public at least, was coming to an end.

"Brian, could we get a couple glasses of water to go with that?" asked Castle, seamlessly reading the guy's name off his badge.

The young man nodded and left, but not before giving Castle a long, knowing look, something conspiratorial that made the writer nervous, that made him pause and question.

Castle had no proof beyond a loaded glance, but it was almost as if this young stranger has assumed something about him and about Kate that made them out to be less than they really were. A fling perhaps - two married people tying one on in a dark hotel bar in a forgettable, convenient city remote from home. The husband and the wife of other people. Cheaters here for drinks and a little flirting before they pounced on some months long repressed desire, a desire spawned over the copier machine conceivably. Or was it love at first sight over the rim of a cornstarch-masquerading-as-plastic cup by the water cooler. A bubbling affair about to be consummated now that they were in the freeing, anonymous, unreality of an expensive hotel, where their thoughts could remain far removed from such mundane, guilt-inducing concerns as mortgage payments, diaper changes, orthodontist bills, their sexless marriages, receding hairlines, thickening midsections and dead-end jobs.

Castle hated adultery with a passion but his writer's brain was now in free fall, spinning richer and richer, more and more vivid tales that threatened to dampen his spirits considerably if he couldn't get a grip on reality and clear his head.

One judging look from a stranger that wondered if maybe they were acting out some pedestrian, predictable midlife crisis: that fear that the clock was ticking down, over half the game already over, suddenly realizing it was too late now to be someone. The Nobel prizewinning writer, the poet, the football star, the actress, the supermodel or the singer, the international spy, the cancer specialist, the award-winning inventor or the astronaut anticipated in careless, entitled adolescence. Life's potential was squandered in the heady haze of youth, when people drifted in the belief that there was still time, would always still be time. Castle felt a cold bead of sweat trickle down his back with the percolation of this sickening, gnawing thought. Was this the point he had reached in his own life: over half of it gone, desperately clinging to the hope of a new adventure in Kate?

But instead of killing these doubts with the proof of his own easily measured success, his thoughts spun off, chasing the gloomy spiral cast out by the waiter's single judgmental look; a look that tapped into something primal, something hardwired in Castle's own psyche. Because for a long time that had been his own personal fear: you will never be special, distinctive, achieve much of anything to be proud of. No one will speak of you after your death in the hushed, reverent tones reserved for greatness. No library will archive your papers, iTunes will not sell your back catalog, no museum will curate your art, your photographs, your installations will not grace the walls or empty floor space of any cutting edge Chelsea gallery when they hold a retrospective in your honor. So you cheat on your wife to recreate yourself for a night. Poor you, the look said. I pity you.

Maybe boredom had crept in, Brian's taunting glance seemed to suggest. You are looked on by those younger as already old, despite feeling as young as you did at twenty-five, at least on the days when your left knee doesn't ache. This premature assumption, or misinterpretation of age, is what Castle saw in the younger barman's eyes and he hated the truth his brain was attempting to conjure from that look, along with the depressive effect it was having on both his mind and body.

Affairs allowed for reinvention. Castle knew that from bitter past experience, from Meredith's vain attempts at self-justification after her own, unforgivable indiscretion. You discarded the messy parts of your life: the weaknesses, the failures, the sneaky bad habits you kept to yourself in the beginning when you still had a mind to care and a drive to impress. With an affair you presented the best of yourself, you made an effort, and in the performance of that role you came to believe that you were that pared back, buffed down, shiny, attractive, desirable person you sought so hard to be. You bought the lie, hook, line and sinker, just as you spun it, reeling in your catch. The truth was depressing, and Castle could see all of this knowledge in the other man's eyes: a tired, cynical, almost disgusted distain for the people he believed Rick and Kate to be amidst the deliberately under-lit backdrop of this luxury establishment.

Castle bristled with this knowledge. He had an urge to set the guy straight, but the words wouldn't come. With Kate Beckett's taut ass cradled in his lap, her amazingly long legs cast atop his, and the warm, comforting weight of her body resting completely on top of him for the first time - certainly in any willing sense - he was rendered incapable of explaining exactly what they were – to himself or anyone else. He only knew that he wanted more of this physical closeness and as often as possible. They weren't old, he knew that much, and together their potential for future greatness seemed limitless to him. And no sneering, prematurely cynical barman, whose only life experience was a thousand sad stories gained by some vicarious osmosis across the gleaming mahogany of a backlit bar, would persuade him otherwise.

Gina's premature demise still lingered around him like the reek of death. It was in his hair, on his clothes, it swirled in his nostrils with every breath he took when he made no conscious effort to force it further away. If Gina could be gone – a woman so vivid, so youthful, still in her prime and seemingly omnipresent in Castle's life, then death hovered close to him too. These thoughts colored so much of his view on life, and it colored his reaction to tonight's string of surprises too. Gina left this life through no choice of her own. Had the crash not occurred would they have patched things up? Would they still be together? Would tonight be happening at all? Would he and Kate indeed be cheating as Brian's silent judgement seemed to suggest?

"Here," he heard Kate say just as he felt her long, cool fingers begin caressing the nape of his neck.

When he turned his head away from the retreating waiter to look at his partner, her face was right there in front of him, not an inch between their noses now as she cradled a sinfully shiny, bright red maraschino cherry between her parted lips.

He had no idea where to put his hands. At least that had been his preoccupation before (what he would later come to call) "Cherrygate". But right now he had no idea how to breathe, let alone speak.

Kate nudged his nose with her own and somewhere in his cranium cells fired up enough to realize that she wanted him to take the cherry from her lips.

That's right. To take the cherry from her lips!

"Uh," he mumbled, swallowing thickly. "You need a hand with that?"

Her fingers caressed the back of his head once more, her neat, rounded nails sliding deeper into the short hair at the base of his skull before he felt a slight pressure as she angled his head closer to her own. Her face tilted on an axis around the tip of her nose, which was resting against his own. The sweet, slightly almond fragrance of the cherry filled his nostrils, drugging him, until he felt the shiny fruit press against his lips, and then glory, glory hallelujah, his mind went fabulously blank.

Kate waited until the cherry was balanced between their mouths and then she pushed the preserved fruit free with her tongue, ensuring that it passed from her lips to Castle's without breathing air. Just as the last half of the cherry was set to disappear into her partner's mouth, she bit the sticky fruit clean in two, eating her own half with a slow, deliberate mastication that veered towards the pornographic, while watching Castle consume his own share in stunned, moronic disbelief.

Once her cherry was done, she picked up her drink and took a sip to cleanse her palate of the overly sweet, sugar syrup preserving liquor. She felt Castle's hand land on her thigh, the warm weight of his touch one of the most grounding feelings she'd ever experienced. Her shoulders dropped and she let herself relax further into his lap.

"You okay there, partner?" she asked, dancing over his face with the light, giddy gaze of the playfully tipsy.

He rubbed his large hand down her thigh towards the knee and back up again, a kind of experiment. "Never better."

"You gonna drink that?" she asked, nodding towards his untouched drink, which was still sitting on the table beside his chair, the whisky rusty and brooding in the heavy-bottomed, crystal Old-Fashioned glass.

He reached for the Bowmore, as instructed, and clinked his glass against Kate's. "Cheers. Here's to Baltimore. City of Firsts, so they say. Thanks for the memories," he added, downing half his measure in one.

His heart was pounding, his hand shaking a little when he placed the glass back on the glass-topped side table with a loud click.

"City of Firsts, huh?" murmured Kate, swirling her cocktail around her own shallow-sided glass, a secret smile on her lips. "We couldn't have picked a better place, don't you think?"

"We?" echoed Castle, sounding slightly amused, doubtful of his role in the selection of this night, this city, and indeed this hotel for their very own intimate first. A last first, if he had anything to do with the path of their lives after tonight.

"Okay, me," agreed Kate, arching her eyebrow saucily to acknowledge her own duplicity, her boldness in steering them here.

"With a motto like that? Seems destined, I grant you."

"Where else would you have chosen?" she asked, pausing before thinking to add, "Had you been the one doing the choosing."

Castle felt his pulse pick up speed again, the fluttering beat actively tangible in his throat when he spoke. "For our first time?"

Saying the words felt daring, in a good way, a liberating way. Not the risk of jinxing things he would have felt in the past. Before the summer started, before the accident, before they grew closer, best friends and more. Before Gina died.

Kate seemed unabashed by the subject matter, the act even, that they were discussing or by her own premeditative actions in coordinating the circumstances required to allow matters to unfold as she now clearly desired them to. While his own thoughts clearly sounded jumbled even inside his head. (see previous sentence) She was unconcerned by how declarative her question sounded coming from someone who, until very recently, had played her cards so close to her chest there was little danger of anyone guessing her opinion of her partner – least of all the man himself - beyond that she had begun to warm to having him around at work.

"Yeah."

Castle sipped his drink, mulling her query. "You're not messing around," he observed.

"Probably because I messed up before. I'm trying the direct route this time…speaking my mind."

"Then if we're being direct, I'd have chosen Paris."

Kate smiled and nodded, perhaps just a hint of shyness making her duck her head at the last second before she said, "The best small town in Texas? Or the City of Love."

"If you need to ask, I've been going about things all wrong. Giving off the wrong signals."

Kate finally blushed, her cheekbones radiating an attractive pinky-peach color that reminded Castle of a ripe nectarine. "That's…"

"Premature?"

Kate shook her head, finding the sensation a little jarring, as if her skull was moving faster than her brain, causing a little internal ricochet of her soft, grey matter. "I don't think so."

Castle's eyes widened. "Is that…I mean, do you think maybe in time—"

She halted his stumbled speech with two fingers to his lips and a whispered request. "If I tell you a secret, will you take me upstairs?"

Her warm breath, fragranced with sweet cherry and a little alcohol, washed over his mouth making his skin fizz with excitement. "You can tell me anything. Read me your grocery list, Kate, and I will gladly take you upstairs."

"I think I'm falling in love with you."

She seemed a little bewildered by this confession. Not by having said it, but by the fact contained within it: that she was falling in love with her partner. Castle was by equal measures giddy with elation beyond compare and crestfallen.

He frowned. "Are you…unsure? Or…or does that make you unhappy?"

Kate shook her head. "No, I'm pretty sure. And…hey, I stopped drinking coffee to forget about you, remember? Does that sound like someone who'd be unhappy in love?"

He knew she loved coffee, so for Castle the act of giving it up left him a little muddled as to the decoding of meaning behind that act of self-denial.

"Uh. It sounds like someone with pretty strong feelings. Though I'm not sure if it's me or coffee you were really giving up."

Kate tipped forward to rest her forehead on the heel of her hand, taking a moment before she looked up at him again. "You walked away with someone else, Rick, assuming that I was still with someone else. Our timing was so bad, our communication was…lousy, and then—"

Without breaking eye contact she fumbled around in her lap until she found his hand and then she clasped it hard. "Castle, I nearly lost you. That night on the expressway…anything could have happened."

"True. Only I'm here. We're here now, Kate."

Her eyes looked a little glassy, shiny with emotion and alcohol both. She took another breath and pinned him with a look so serious, so grave, he had a sudden urge to laugh. "This could ruin our partnership. You know that."

Castle's response came on slow, after a few seconds deliberation. "Maybe."

"But I don't think I want to pretend anymore." She confessed this to him as if he were a priest, whispered and reverent, a revelatory discovery she'd only just worked out for herself.

"You don't?"

"No."

"What exactly are you pretending?"

"That being your friend is enough. Watching you date other women…" She shook her head, frowning in the process. "I can't do that. Not anymore."

"Good. Me neither."

Kate smirked a little tipsily. "Technically, I don't tend to date other women as a general rule."

Castle laughed. "You are so drunk."

"Am not," she declared indignantly. "I'll recite the Presidents for you if you don't believe me."

"Not as impressive anymore. Not since I saw a two year old run the full pack on YouTube without a single slip up. Kid was still wearing diapers and a bunny print bodysuit."

"Jeez. Next thing you'll be telling me the Gerber baby has his own Twitter account."

Castle gave an amused, confirming nod. "At GerberLife"

Kate let out a gleeful peel of laughter. "I'm not sure which is worse. That he has one or that you know the actual name."

Castle took her hand, stroked his thumb over her wrist. "I know this is role reversal, but we've kind of gone off brief here, detective."

Kate shook her head to clear it, the straight, shiny cut of her hair shimmering in the low light. "What were we saying? Remind me. I might be a little…tipsy."

"You were worried about our partnership if we…move to a more intimate relationship."

"Ah, that. Damned if I do ya," she leered, tugging on his lapel.

Castle barked a laugh of surprise. "Damned if you don't."

"Exactly!" Kate blurted in triumph, jabbing her finger into his shoulder.

"Look, the way I see it, trying to be serious for a second. Our partnership would be over one way or another, whether we date each other or other people." Castle's logic pared their dilemma to the bone.

"So…what do we do?"

"Give this a shot? Us?" He looked like he was making a suggestion, not wholeheartedly behind a solid plan.

"You're sure? Cause you don't sound totally sure."

"What? No. Look, I'm not saying grow old with me, Kate."

With his hand still resting on her leg, he spoke earnestly, while she looked on bereft, as if she felt cheated by the diminished demand he had just made of her.

"You're not?"

Castle's eyes widened and he halted, confused. "Well. Not yet. Unless you want me to?" he rushed to add.

"You think it's too soon?"

They were chasing in circles.

"I—" He looked speechless for one gloriously hilarious second.

"So what are you saying?"

"I guess I'm saying…I'm pretty sure I've fallen in love with you too, and I don't want to let that feeling go. Not for anything. In fact, I want more of it…all the time. Kate, I want—"

When Kate's cell phone rang it startled the ridiculous, idiotic, romantic smiles off both their faces, and Castle's heart sank. But instead of moving off his lap as he expected her to, she simply fished her phone out of her pocket to answer it, seeming more than happy to take the call right where she was.

She had been mid-sip of her Manhattan, more Dutch courage perhaps, when the call came in to shatter their private moment, and in jerking the glass away from her mouth in surprise she had managed to splash the cocktail onto her white shirt in the process. Castle watched as the pink liquid quickly spread across the weft and up and down the warp threads of the silk fabric like a blooming bloodstain. Kate's hand splayed over Castle's thigh as she resisted his second attempt to dislodge her from his lap.

"Hey, Espo. What's up?" she asked instead, squeezing his quad to indicate that he should just relax.

Castle observed with bemused glee as his normally buttoned-up partner of two years took a work call while sitting sprawled across his lap in a hotel bar. He tried to focus beyond the curves of her body pressing against his to make out the gist of the call and the reason for its lateness. Kate helpfully repeated some of what Javi said so he would understand.

Basically, the pick-up tomorrow morning had been moved to a new location, one the girl, Harmony Cisse, would be safer in overnight after some street intel had reached them from New York that their main suspect, Djibril Martin, had found out that Harmony was hiding out down in Baltimore and that she had been seen talking to police.

Castle cut his gaze from the phone in Kate's hand to the livid stain now marring her left breast. At least if she caught him staring this time he had a cover story. He flagged down the passing barman, who was in the process of extinguishing the little votive candles burning on tables around the bar.

"Hey, Brian, can I get a glass of club soda and a bunch of napkins?" he asked, gesturing in Kate's general direction to indicate the unsightly pink stain.

"Is that Castle?" asked Esposito, causing Kate to roll her eyes at her partner. "Where are you guys? And what's up with the club soda? Did Castle spill ketchup on his pants again?"

"No, he did not," Kate replied, employing a no nonsense tone to defend her partner's dignity. "We haven't even eaten yet. So, I'm gonna go before one of us passes out. Okay. Tell the Sergeant he can reach me on my cell if they make any more changes to the arrangements before tomorrow. And, Javi, text me that new address, would you?"

"Someone's nosy," remarked Castle after Kate had ended the call, as he accepted the club soda and a clean cloth from Brian.

"What's new?" muttered Kate, watching Castle move around her body with care as he soaked the white rag in soda and then hovered it in front of her shirt with a dawning question in his eyes.

"Well…go on…if you're going to," she prompted, egging him on.

He thrust the damp cloth out to her, losing his nerve. "Maybe you should do it."

"You have a better angle," she argued, before smirking and adding, "Not to mention way more practice…with stain removal, I mean."

"Because I have a kid, is the fact I hope you were referring to."

Kate shook her head, teasing him with a sexy grin. "Uh. I'm pretty sure Alexis got through most of her formative years without spilling so much as a drop of grape juice. She's too ladylike."

"Did not. I cleaned her up plenty of times."

"Mm-hmm," Kate hummed doubtfully.

"Though I may have cleaned a few more spills of my own. If we're counting."

Kate conceded the contest gracefully, dragging her gaze away from Castle's flushed face to inspect the stain on her shirt. "This'll be way easier to clean if I just take it off," she said, plucking at the hem to free it from her pants.

"Whoa there, little lady," said Castle, catching her wrists before she could start on the row of tiny pearl buttons.

Kate blinked at him innocently. "What's the problem?"

"Maybe you should do that up in the room," he suggested, looking around to indicate that they were in a public place in case she'd forgotten.

"There's no one left in here," Kate replied, also looking around. "We're the last two in this joint."

"Maybe that should tell us something."

Kate glanced over at the bar. "You think Brian wants to go home?"

"I think Brian is a presumptuous, judgmental jerk and he can wait until we're good and ready."

"Good. So do I. Did you see the way he smirked at us earlier? Like we're a pair of seedy adulterers or something."

Castle couldn't quite believe Kate was still capable of being so perceptive given how tipsy she appeared just a moment ago. But then he had long ago learned not to underestimate his partner.

"I also think we have an early start tomorrow and we'll need our wits about us to deal with whatever young Harmony throws our way. So…if you're ready, we should really go upstairs."

Kate seemed to sober instantly at Castle's seriously pitched, though gentle, argument. There was no hint of leering, teasing or anything suggestive in his tone at all, just honest sincerity that the best thing for them both was to go up to bed. Kate was impressed.

"Help me up?"

She'd been sitting in his lap for so long her legs felt like they might have gone to sleep.

"My pleasure," her partner said quietly, placing one hand on her elbow and one on her waist to steady her when she got to her feet.

Once safely upright, she waited for him to finish his drink and gather up his wallet and cell phone.

"Night," Kate said to the lone barman, who was currently returning a bowl of unused limes to the fridge.

"Y'all have a good one," Brian drawled, giving them both a nod, saving a final leering smirk and an oversized wink for Castle once Kate's back was turned.

Castle touched Kate's arm to get her attention. "Would you give me a second? I'll meet you out by the elevator," he said, not hiding in any way what he was about to do.

Kate nodded slowly then she stretched up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. "Don't be long," she told him, letting her hand slide down from his shoulder, over his bicep, before squeezing his forearm and then heading out of the bar alone.

"Hey, man. Did you need something?" asked Brian as soon as Castle came back into view.

"Nope. Just a quick question. My wife and I were debating earlier, kind of a friendly argument type thing. She swears you're single but I—"

Castle broke off after watching the guy's face fall on the word "wife". No need to continue his charade any further.

He nodded once and backed away. "Yeah, man. My wife. How about that, huh? And the old magic's still there after all these years. Still likes to sit in my lap like we're teenagers." Castle pointed to the guy before he turned away and headed for the door. "Well, good luck to you my friend," he said, murmuring under his breath once his back was to the barman, "cause I think you're going to need it."

Kate was waiting for him out by the elevators, her shoulder propped against the wall.

"Well?" she asked, one eyebrow cocked in amusement.

"Well what?" asked Castle, stabbing impatiently at the call button.

"Did you lay him out cold for his sneering little performance?"

"No. But I did set him straight. I don't think he'll be judging any more books by their covers for a while."

"I see what you did there, Mr. Castle, world famous novelist," Kate giggled, sliding her arm through her partner's.

The elevator doors opened before them like a silent mystery, and they stepped aboard together.

"Come on, Beckett. Let's get you up to bed."

TBC...