Your first step is panic.

The first step always has to be panic.

It doesn't matter whether you've just knocked up your twenty-year-old girlfriend or whether your publisher-with-benefits has said to put up or get out or whether your hot badass Detective is considering a major life alteration without considering you.

It's the kind of first step that eventually sends you hurtling to a taxi and rushing yourself over to Lalique and spending almost no time at all agonizing over the assortment of rings (yes, diamond, no, nothing more than two carats, yes, simple and elegant, yes, as much money as you can possibly spend on that kind of thing, done). It's the kind of first step that makes you take that same taxi to your swing set and drag out your phone and dial her number, even though there's a part of you that's still vibrating with fury at her secrets and a part of you that is soaked in a cold and terrified sweat.

It's the kind of first step that forces a strangled proposal out of your throat when she's looking at you like she's waiting for you to break up with her, like a job in DC would actually be enough to drive you away. It's the kind of first step that makes you press your knees hard into the soft grass underneath the swings to steady the tremor in your hand, the kind of first step that, no matter how impulsive and irrational you're being, can't help but leave your heart flinging itself in erratic fits against your sternum.

Your second step is anger.

It's a pretty brief step. Or, well, it would have been, if there hadn't been such a heavy dose of it mixed in with the panic. But there was that secret. The calm and serious way she told you, This is about my life. All the ways it rubbed you raw, the quiet and insidious betrayal wrapped up in it, her words from a year ago abrading the edges of your consciousness (You cut a deal for my life like I was some kind of child. My life. Mine.).

So really, your anger's been simmering along now for too many hours, and it does an excellent job of threating to boil over when she stares at you and the ring with this horrible kind of dread in her eyes. The anger does such a good job, popping and sizzling energetically beneath your skin, that for a moment it burns away even the panic.

You've been good, lately. You've been trying. You hold back and you don't push and you try to spend time away from her, try to help her maintain her shell of space and independence so that the insistent and inevitable twining of your lives doesn't start to feel like it's strangling her. And suddenly somehow this is you not being committed, suddenly somehow this is you not willing to die with her and live with her and do absolutely anything for her.

"Rick," she says to you, a sympathetic kind of gentleness crackling through her voice. "You can't be serious about this."

"Deadly," you say, and then, because you've spent a lot of your life learning and relearning how to suck down that churning sense of rage, "I've had this ring for over an hour now."

Your third step is euphoria.

You didn't really expect her to say yes.

You didn't really expect her to say yes at all.

It's a ridiculous proposal off your worst fight as a couple and you've been dating for a year and you haven't talked to your daughter or her father (not, you mentally acknowledge, that Kate Beckett is the type of woman whose father you necessarily talk to) and you are not even sure if there is any champagne in the fridge except for that shit that Patterson gave you at the last poker game as a Congrats For Hooking Up With Your Muse Veuve Cliquot, and like hell you would drink Patterson's champagne to celebrate an engagement.

But that is not the point. The point is that she is laughing at you, her face breaking into something that is bright and joyful and only very slightly filled with hysteria.

"Over an hour," she laughs, and this is when you start to think that maybe you should have done something a little bit more elegantly so that when you are old and in a rocking chair on your porch you will have something to tell your doe-eyed great grandchildren other than Well, kids, I panicked, and then I said "marry me" at our favorite swing set.

"It was very expensive," you supply, going for broke. You give yourself points for having tried to be serious, though. It had worked for a good several minutes.

"Hell no, Rick Castle, I am not marrying you," she says.

But she is laughing when she says it.

You decide to take this as a yes.

Your fourth step is persistence.

It's really more than a step. It's really more of a long and endless and occasionally pathetic crawl and a string of bridal magazines and far too many puddle jumpers from JFK to DCA. (And then, after ten months, fewer and fewer puddle jumpers from DCA to JFK). It's really more finding all the ways that you can reinsert yourself into her newly-altered life and, at the same time, insert several brilliant wedding ideas.

"No, I got the brochure," she says. You adjust the phone on your shoulder, then hop off the kitchen stool when you hear the telltale scrape of her keys in the door. You hang up when she walks into the entrance hall of her two-bedroom in an up-and-coming area of NoMa. "We are absolutely not flying three hundred people to Puerto Vallarta," she states in a voice that means nothing but business as she toes off her heels.

This is something you note with pride. The first five or six hundred wedding ideas you'd handed over to her, she'd said Why the hell are you giving me this or If that's not going to help me get this report for the AG done by midnight then get it out of my sight. Now she's all denials, negatives that imply positives, positives of her in a white dress and a veil and maybe an incredibly classy diamond tiara that you are quite sure you will never convince her to wear.

"And next time can you not send these specially delivered to work? Branson and Knowles keep their mouths shut for a living, and even they're having trouble laying off it."

"You're right," you say, keeping your face entirely serious. "A secret engagement is the way to go." You're only kind of joking. She's not wearing your ring yet, but you've snuck it into her jewelry box and she's let it stay there, wedged into the sapphire velvet crease in the upper right-hand corner, a promise she sees every morning when she pulls out her father's watch and late every evening when she tucks it back away.

"We're done here," she says, but then she hops up on her toes, tilting at the kitchen. "Oh my God, is that what I smelled as I was coming down the hallway?"

It is ten o'clock and you are sure she hasn't actually stopped to eat more than half the sandwich you so lovingly packed for her at five thirty in the morning. "Fresh orecchiette and broccoli rabe and the ridiculously good Italian sausage from that guy you love so much in Eastern Market."

"If it wasn't love before," she sighs, dragging her button down over her head and absently letting it dangle from a finger as she ambles toward the bedroom.

You swallow, walk over to the kitchen to serve the pasta, steadfastly ignoring the lines of her abs and the delicate lace of her bra. Last week when she hadn't eaten all day you'd had a rather enthusiastic session up against the door that left your back aching for days, and her knees had buckled a little afterwards and you'd sworn up and down that your new motto was food first. "Almost makes you want to marry me, doesn't it?" you call out as you drag down some bowls from the cabinet.

"Almost," you hear her say.

Your fifth step is victory.

You acknowledge that victory is not really a step. Victory is a goal. Victory comes after the accomplishment. Victory has no place on your list of steps.

But then the poetic side of you comes out, prattling on and on about how life with Beckett is a series of victories, about how every day and week and month and year there is some other kind of victory you can celebrate, and so your final step on this particular journey is rather fitting.

You are insidious about this particular victory, you will admit.

You put the ring on her finger after she's passed out post-Case From Hell (you wait weeks for this case, weeks until you know she'll be exhausted enough that she won't wake up when you manipulate her hand, weeks until you're secure in the knowledge that the AG'll grant her a couple days off after the closure). It could fit worse, considering, you fondly recall, that the excessively helpful saleswoman had tried to ask you about size and you'd murmured in a rush, "Just give me that one right there, the taxi's waiting."

You carefully twist the ring onto her finger and then you make pancakes and waffles and eggs and bacon and coffee in the French Press and the Chemex and then, for good measure, a latte from the Delonghi Primadonna Espresso Maker you'd bought her six months ago.

She stumbles into the room and blinks muzzily at you. You're torn between staring at her legs in her appealingly short shorts and staring at the glint of the ring that she has not yet torn off her finger. In the end, your gaze falters back and forth, back and forth, the toned line of her inner thigh stretching up and up and up, the glint of the diamonds on the fourth finger of her left hand flashing playfully.

"Did you seriously put a ring on my finger when you knew I would be too tired to wake up and slap you?" she asks, her voice rough with sleep. She yawns, reaches up and pushes the hair back from her face. The light from the diamonds dances from her hand, and you think maybe this is the best panicked path down which you have ever stumbled.

"And then I made breakfast," you inform her, gesturing to the ridiculous amount of food that covers her entire counter.

"I can't believe you're trying to seduce me into marriage with breakfast."

You grab two random mugs of coffee in your hands and hold them out to her. "Kate Beckett," you say. "Will you drink my coffee every day for the rest of your life?"

This is a much better look than the first time you asked her to marry you. Less confusion and disbelief, more affectionate despair. "That's the most pathetic proposal I have ever heard."

"Really?"

"Nearly," she whispers under her breath, so quietly you almost can't hear it, before she reaches out to take a mug.

"I promise to never stop trying to get it right," you say. You realize that is important to you. If life with Kate Beckett is a series of victories, then life with Kate Beckett must also be a series of questions, link upon link of both monumental and microscopic commitments.

"In that case," she says to you, reaching out with a brilliant smile and wrapping her fingers around the mug. They bump into yours in a prolonged touch that you cannot help but feel is intentional. But then she doesn't finish talking because she's drinking, still watching you, her gaze locked with yours and alight with an unspoken promise.

"In that case," you prompt encouragingly. The coffee is a lovely symbol, as is the ring that is somehow still on her finger, but you are holding out hope for an actual syllable here.

"Yes," she says.

Later, much later, you untangle yourself from underneath her to find that all of your carefully constructed planning has fallen into shambles. There is a small lagoon of coffee in the middle of the floor beside a chipped mug. The untouched waffles and bacon and eggs have tumbled into the sink. On the side of the sofa, Beckett's body is folded into a complicated knot in a way that is going to be painful when she eventually wakes up. The ring is somewhere deep within the bowels of the couch – you should have known it was too big the second you were able to slide it on her finger as she slept.

For a moment you stand paralyzed. The very real results of this situation are spread over her apartment in a mess of chipped kitchenware and cold eggs down the disposal and an overpriced ring that you can only fervently pray will someday be retrievable after that particularly acrobatic move of hers when she was draped halfway off the couch.

You swivel to stare at her slumped form, her too-large shirt exposing the elegant arc of her collarbone, the late-morning sun turning the sweep of her eyelashes gold. You let yourself feel this moment, unanchored from steps and time and series of logical consequences, unanchored in anything but the slow and steady beat of your pulse through your veins and the play of the sunlight over her face.

And then you unstick your feet. Walk to the kitchen. Pick up a roll of paper towels. Start cleaning.