Coz anticipation is like a balloon. One prick and it's gone

Picking up on a couple of things said in recent interviews from the actress wot plays Beckett: she's crazy about Castle, and SK would love to be in an episode that's a bit Seinfeld-like — no murder for the day, but a lot of other stuff going on. This'll tend to be a little cracky, with a hint of canon and a lot of au. See, I'm not really sure how to genre-ize it, sorry, but I hope it will be a bit of fun. I'm aiming for short, salacious chapters and will attempt to update weekly.

It's the lingering look after his scantily clad comment that has her fixating on taking up his offer to peruse his issues. At any time, Castle had said, and she'd felt the vertical extent of his own perusal as she pretended to focus on his comic collection.

The trail for the killer might have grown cooler at that particular moment, but Castle's invitation had all of Kate's spidey senses tingling in the most inappropriate places. When was it that she'd decreed herself unable to be in the relationship she really wanted? She must have been postoperative, immersed in PTSD or just plain MENTAL. She'd forgotten about the primal urge of lust.

There are relationships, then there is this relationship. There are men, but there is this man and (apparently) there are feelings of liking and desire ... but then there's love. And when it's coupled — quadrupled — with all this physical stuff naffling at her noggin and doppling at her ganger?

Um, yeah. Kate Beckett is so fried. She's also conjuring fake words, using English incorrectly and catching herself watching him when she should be working.

She's been in it before, hasn't she? She's felt stuff. Like wanting to smile whenever she thinks about a significant other? Yes ... um, no ... not really. Like wondering what he's thinking or doing most of her waking hours. Um ... No, not usually. She liked Josh, right, but did she really think about him at the hospital while she was going about her day? Ahhh, that'd be 'mostly, no.'

Well, she has encountered that situation where her nipples go berserk when she's being kissed and touched. She has been horny enough to make love in a car, she's enjoyed the company of men enough to buy them birthday gifts, meet them for dinner, hold hands in the movies, meet family members ...

But yeah. She is so fried. With Castle. Egg and bacon fried, hot, spiced, searing round the edges and bubbling on the surface. Spitting and hissing with this thing that has her spinning and grinning and wondering just how much of the wall needs pulling down before she's ready to reach into his pants and feel for any remaining edifice that might linger.

His brick is sure to be hard. His foundations are gonna be upright. The uppermost top of his own wall is going to be easy to mount ... but this line of inquiry is causing her eyes to cross and her legs to blink.

Kate had forgotten about the urgent demand of lust. She hadn't even imagined the power of it when it's partnered with this other thing. This emotion. This crazy, hazy, wanna-make-lazy-time love.

Not only is she fried, she's possibly gonna eat her words, which is just something the Beckett of old would never, ever do within the vicinity of Richard Castle. But between him geeking out about comic books, trying to impress Sir Frosty Gates, and asking if she'd be scantily dressed as a superhero, she's starting to think that her declaration on the swings was simply buying her time.

Buying her some time to drive herself insane!

When she'd stood beside Castle, watching Ann and her guy spindle into face touching and an elevator make-out session, Beckett felt her own legs turn to hot fudge sauce. She wanted to puddle on the ground in the middle of the precinct, sludge out to some quiet space and invite Castle to be her banana split. Somehow, she was able to don her game face. Work is ultra-helpful in this situation, she's discovering, and maybe it always has been? Kate's able to apply stealth to her Castle viewing, indifference to her cheekbones, and squishy repression to the grin that threatens to erupt from her lips at any given time she's watching him.

The other, more ardent, physical reactions? She's damn lucky that they remain discreetly tucked away between the top of her heels and the bottom of her scar.

She's forgotten about the urge, way down there, way down real low — but whoa! She had that urgency with Tom, she'd just had it with Josh — she really, really had — but this is something else. This is like comparing the swoosh of a Buell Blast between her legs with the throb of a Harley-Davidson CVO spiraling into her own gearbox. Suddenly, Kate has needs that she hasn't recognized before. She wants to taste, touch and stroke, have her hair messed. Right about now! She wants lips pressed into a mouth that she is sure is as talented as she dreamt ... yeah, that dream ...

That very morning, in fact.

Kate had awoken to a strange sensation flooding her body. At first she'd thought it was the remnants of the night sweats she'd encountered during her recovery, where the only thing that had pulsated was her healing scar and the only other things that had moistened were her forehead and bedding. Oh, and the only thing coming was her next round of physiotherapy or medication.

But this morning?

Her face had been hot, but not wet, and her scar had been tight, but not humping. There was moisture around after this particular Castle dream, but it was nowhere near her cheeks — unless she counted those under her nightwear — and, jeez, there was throbbing like a Harley CVO machine of throbster.

Kate had been so churned up by the intensity of the early morning dream, she couldn't see straight until her second cup of coffee. It was as though an alien form had descended from the Planet of Lovin' Porn, planted an army of machines along all her zones of sensuality, and upped the stimulation from a computer hard drive of zap.

It had been that weird. And that much of a thrill ride, she'd reached beneath her sheet, found the exact spot where she needed just that little bit ... more ... oh ... pressure from that army of loving ... right there ... and—

The cellphone had made her jump. Kate had retracted her hand as though she'd been caught touching the last nub of brick in what remained of her wall, and although she didn't want to use her serious words to Castle on the swing as some sort of kinky, analogical farce, she kept thinking about tearing the facade down.

She wanted to bash it down. Bit by bit, brick by brick, so that the fortress of her castle will be open — so very, very open — to the flood of the moat, but Richard Edgar Alexander? The guy must be confused because she's only recently decreed her own keep as a no-go zone. Kate might just have to be more direct in her redrawing of the sexual battle-lines.

'Beckett,' she had said, scrambling to make her morning voice sound professional, even though her thoughts were still on the dream. If anything was going to clear her head of heat and lust, it was the freeze-tone of Captain Deli Gates, a woman who was earning herself a new nickname every single time she opened her mouth at the precinct.

'I'd like you here a little earlier today, Detective,' Gates had ordered over the phone. Kate hadn't expected a 'good morning, sweetie, would you be good enough to be downtown for a breakfast meeting, please,' but a simple 'hello, Detective Beckett' would have been appreciated.

They were cops, fine. Didn't mean that they had to speak to each other like pigs.

'Of course ... Sir. When were you think—'

'ASAP, Detective. Unfortunately this can't wait.'

Yeah, but neither can her own needs way down yonder, where the castle iron gates are about to encounter a Squadron of Penetrative Members ready to storm the—

'And you need to notify your pal. Mr Castle is very much involved in this ... how will I put it? Dawn raid?'

Kate hears the supercilious inflection in Gates's voice and she can imagine that Sir is sneering into her own cell piece. Pity she's not the type of girl-captain that an aroused detective can share a story with. There's nothing more that Beckett would like to do than to grill 'oh, yeah, Castle is very much involved with his own dawn raid at my place too. Lemme tell you about the dream I just had ...' into the phone, rasping out exactly how she's feeling to her captain. Her mentor.

Yeah, like that would happen. Like Beckett would share the dream with anyone, even Castle. Especially Castle, although if she were able to play for time now, tell Gates that she needs a shower to wake herself up, a little alone time to get her into her detective zone, Beckett would be able to use her own fingers to lace into that spot—

'I expect you're on you way, Detective!' Gates slams into the phone. 'Have you called your Mr Castle, yet?'

If Gates wasn't so by-the-book, Kate would suspect that the new captain had a webcam threaded along the streets of NYC and hooked into somewhere between the Beckett bedroom and her brain. Talk about mood killer. The fact that Roy would have given a girl some time to get moving in the morning before she—

'I said ASAP, BECKETT!'

Before Kate can process another negative thought about Deli Gates or more of the profane about Castle, her captain has shut off communication, and try as she might to shut off the orders, the cop in Beckett responds. She speed dials Castle while grabbing some clothes and running a one minute shower. Not even time to consider the root of her wall foundations or feel for a brick or two.

'Dial sleepy time for Richard Castle,' comes the deep throat of sexy. It's 5am. Beckett imagines him in his boxers and bed hair, pillow flattened from face interaction, whiskers buffed and brittle. She wonders if she'll wake him round about that time on some mornings in the future, when the only thing that stands between them is skin, skimp and scars.

'Beckett?'

She'll take his hand from where it rests atop her hipbone and guide it. He's sure to still be asleep, on his side, snuggling her from behind, but she'll be restless, edgy and want his fingers to—

'Kate?'

His urgency floods her earpiece like the surge of sexual moat into her castle buttress. The shower screams 'waste-of-hot-water' and Beckett's cop instincts clog over her deviant thoughts. Only just.

'Oh, Castle,'

Wrong start, Kate. She immediately conjures all those moments when she's going to be moaning that very same phrase, and none of the pictures in her porn-house of a brain have her clothed in anything but a smile.

'Is everything okay, Kate?'

He speaks into his cell as though his vocal chords have been gargled in gasoline and pumped into pureed groan seeds. And no, she's not okay, thanks very naked-touch much. She wants him every-which-way-till-Sunday, longs to fumble nude and free in the Hamptons, yearns to — rather bizarrely — squander time while performing graphic gymnastic routines on her mattress, and desperately needs to retract her 'I'm not ready!' declaration.

What the hell was she thinking a month ago?

'Beckett? Is there a body? Is someone stiff?'

Um, how to answer that one. Probably someone, somewhere is stiff and she's sure if she had the correct equipment, she'd be feeling that way right about now.

His voice smokes hot worry, but all she can focus on is his use of the words 'stiff' and 'body'. 'Bod-dee'. Yeah, that's what she wants. A body. His. Anywhere south of her equator and north of his pole. Everywhere. With the immediacy of a spinning globe.

'Okay, Kate! Stay where you are. I'm coming over. I'm coming.'

It hits her like a spasm in the shower. He's coming. Coming now? Coming already? But she's missed all the preliminaries, and that's exactly how this state of mind, and body, started. That dream. It focused entirely on all such preliminaries, climaxed in a spurt of so, so, so desperately close, only to have her awaken to the phone call of Gated doom.

Shit! Gates. Castle and the precinct. ASAP, BECKETT, dawn raids, 'your' Mr Castle.

Warring with the pheromones responsible for anything Richard Castle — her Castlemoans? — Kate takes her frustrations out on the soap pump, wallops the faucet closed and jumps out of the shower to pick up the phone she'd left on 'speaker' as she speed-washed.

Mumbling a jumble of apologies including her not being in any danger, the (disappointing) lack of stiffness and bodies, and the order to get down to the precinct for a breakfast meeting with Captain Ahab, Kate almost misses Castle's observation:

'Ah, but Ahab was a tyrant.'

She doesn't, and it causes her to smile more than she should, snortle more than she thought possible with such newly-mended skin, and flush. It seems the Castlemoans eliciting those pheromones just keep bobbing up and whetting her wares.

'So the difference between Gates and Ahab is?' she chirps, rattling round for her keys, securing her watch, threading her mother's ring between her scar and hairline. 'You up?'

Kate! For the love of God! What sort of question is that?

It's too late to retract the double entendre, she can hear the rumble of his own appreciation, straight from that downy-haired chest into her earpiece. Not that she's looked. Um, at her earpiece, but his chest hairs do have the tendency to peak very hotly at the opening of his shirts, especially if he leans over her desk.

And that chest cavity, which is encased by two swaddling sets of biceps either side, would be like a cavernous, squashy jam when she needs to be held—

'I'm often up.' His response is quite expected, but followed by, 'at this time of the morning,' has Beckett's face spinning and head aglow. Oh, she bets he is, and she wouldn't waste a week's salary wagering against it.

'Meet you in there?' she offers, willing her body to be still its achey betrayal of all things Castle want. She briefly wonders when she'll have the chance to set things right today. Whether she'll simply say something while they're driving to a crime scene, whether she'll pull in somewhere for lunch and feel him up in the car, whether she'll invite him home for a takeout dinner and some dream reenactment, or whether she'll just tell him.

'I'll meet you anywhere, Beckett,' he says into the phone, the (possible) silk of his boxer shorts nothing compared to his voice. 'And don't think I'll let that Captain Ahab thing go. We might even have a whale of a time today.'

Snipping off her cell and deciding on her helmet instead of her car keys, she thinks about the wisdom of asking him whether a white whale can also be a sperm whale or if it's safe to explore blowholes under the tyrannical eye of Captain Ahab.

Kate elects to leave the seaman metaphors for later.

TBC. (I should probably warn readers that this may be a screwball tease of a thing. If you don't like that type of read — and we all like the instant gratification now and then ; ) — it might be a little frustrating. Still, hopefully, there might be something in each chapter to make you smile : D