Chapter 180: 180. Happy days
Castle appears at Beckett’s door at his normal time, but appearing somewhat as if he has rushed.
“What’s the hurry?” she enquires.
“Thought I’d be late.”
“Late? We didn’t set a time. I’m not standing here with a stopwatch waiting for you to be half a second delayed.” She grins, and draws him inside. “Of course, the later you are, the less time we have for this…” and she rises up on her bare toes and kisses him in a leisurely, seductive fashion. “You wouldn’t want to rush, would you?” She kisses him again, until she’s content that his toes have curled, and then sashays off to the couch.
Well, she tries to sashay off to the couch. She even starts the sashay. She just doesn’t get very far. Castle, not inclined to be a toy today, is much more inclined to play with his toy, and he doesn’t want to have to chase it down or find it. Since his toy has come out of the toybox, she should stay where he wants her. He spins her neatly around and back into him, delivers a toe-curling kiss of his own which quite clearly asserts his ownership of her mouth, and then follows up with a firm, close hold till she softens and drapes against him, when he kisses her again, possessively. He’ll decide when they separate, and that’s not right now.
It’s not after they’ve reached the couch, either. Castle tugs Beckett down on to his knee, and encourages her to lean on his shoulder where she’s perfectly cuddly and kissable.
“Did the session go okay?”
“Yes,” Beckett says – and almost bounces happily on his knee, which is astonishing. Astonishment is explained in an instant. “I don’t need to go on Friday if I don’t think I need to. And on Tuesday we’ll think about revising the session schedule completely. Less Dr Burke!”
“Wow,” Castle says. “That’s awesome. He must be really happy.”
“Never mind his happiness, I’m happy.”
“That too. I’m happy as well,” he hums. “Everyone’s happy.”
“Why are you happy?” Beckett asks, happily sure that he’ll have a good – nay, happy – reason.
“Mother’s got the directing role,” Castle says with deep pleasure. “So she’ll be out the way. She’s never going to worry about us if she’s got a whole play to manage.”
“Worth being happy about,” Beckett agrees. She nestles in, and slips delicately dangerous fingers into the vee of his shirt. “I could make you even happier,” she purrs.
Castle rumbles wordlessly and contentedly, resembling a large and lazy lion. Beckett’s fingertips wander. Mysteriously, a button opens. Castle had absolutely nothing to do with it, but he’s quite happy for buttons bemusingly to open, shirts strangely to become untucked, pants peculiarly to fall away and leave only skin touching skin, smooth and silky on the one side, strong and a little roughened with hair on the other. Another contented rumble eventuates, shortly tending to a predatory bass-baritone growl. He’s still not inclined to be a toy, though he’s been content for Beckett to play as she pleases for the last few moments. He likes being petted just as much as Beckett does, as long as he can be assertively masculine later.
“I’m happy now,” he rasps. “Let’s go and both be very happy together.” Beckett wriggles against him.
“Aren’t you happy here?” she husks. “You feel pretty happy to me.”
“I’d be much happier if we were in your bed,” Castle murmurs insinuatingly. “So much more room to make you happy, which will make me happy, which will make us both happy.”
“What if I want to make you happy right here?” Beckett says, and applies her wickedly wandering fingers to show exactly what she means, coupled with a wickedly wanton tonguing of her lips.
Castle takes a deep breath. His voice lowers by another several tones. “You can get to that later. Right now, I’ve got a better plan.”
“Oh?” Beckett pouts, flickering her fingers once more. “Are you sure about that?”
Castle isn’t, under the erotic touches of her fingers. Shortly, he isn’t sure of his own name, or whether his limbs – apart from one very particular limb – are still attached to his body. Beckett is evil. She didn’t listen to him at all. She’s turned him into a groaning mess and while it was absolutely spectacular it was not fair that he didn’t get his own way first. And she’s smirking. Unfortunately looking at her lush lips and her satisfied face, atop her barely clad, kneeling, lissom body, is not doing anything at all for his ability to recover intelligence, thought or game. On the other hand, he doesn’t need intelligence, thought or game. All he needs to do is to give in to his instincts, which require none of those attributes but simply release.
So that’s what he does.
His instincts tell him to pick her up and kiss her till she whimpers; to convey her to her bedroom and drop her on her bed; to remove the tiny scraps of silk and lace that she’s still wearing; to rise over her and to take her in one smooth hard thrust and bring them both to climax. His instincts tell him to hold her hard to him, and then to turn her so that her back is to him and his hands are free to roam; to spread over small firm breasts and erect nipples and tease and play until she mews and moans and writhes in his clasp; to trail down between her legs and slip and slide and stroke in the slick wet heat until she’s mindless with desire and frantically moving; to drive her up all over again with fingers taking her and thumb rubbing her until he lets her explode once more.
And then his instincts tell him to cuddle her close and bury his nose in her hair and simply be together in the best of ways. So he does.
Castle wakes up cold and confused, although both of these unpleasantnesses are considerably ameliorated by the fact that he is still wrapped around his beautiful Beckett. She is not cold, and being asleep is probably not confused either. This doesn’t seem fair. He muses on that for a few seconds, and then suddenly remembers that he hadn’t meant to spend the night, hasn’t made any arrangements, and is now around – he scrabbles for his watch, oh God – three hours past curfew. Oh God oh God. Oh God. He should be home right now.
“Beckett,” he says, tapping her and then shaking her. “Beckett, wake up!”
“No.” She keeps her eyes firmly shut. “Not waking up. Come back.”
“I have to go home.”
“No. Don’t want you to.” She reaches out, still nine-tenths asleep, and tries to pull him back. “Stay here. You belong here. With me.” She tugs hard, and Castle, somewhat confused by the definite tone of the last sentences, falls back on to the bed with his pants half on and his shirt unbuttoned. Beckett wraps herself over him without apparently needing to open eyes or engage brain. This is not helpful.
“I have to go home,” he says again. “Let go. I’ll see you later,” he adds, in the tone he’d use if offering a later reward-treat for good behaviour now to a small child. Beckett emits a sleep-soaked noise of considerable disgruntlement and flumps to the side. There is a mutter. On analysis, it might consist of don’t want you to go.
“I don’t want to go either, but I need to. I’ll bring you doughnuts,” he says persuasively.
“Bear claw. No-one else brings bear claws. Not allowed to.”
Castle decides he likes mostly-asleep-but-talking Beckett. “Not allowed to?”
“Only you get to. Special.” She snuggles under her comforter, until only her eyebrows are on view. “Tomorrow you’ll see,” which is completely meaningless, and then more definitively, “Coffee and bear claw. Love you.”
Castle finishes getting dressed to the soothing sound of Beckett’s deep, slumberous breathing. She’s very cute when she isn’t really awake. He dashes home, bribing the cab driver, and arriving to a dark and silent loft. There is a note in Alexis’s rounded handwriting on the desk in his study: Guess you’re with Detective Beckett. Good. Night, Dad. PS Grams happy. Talked non-stop about the play. Didn’t mention you or moving out once, except to say that the sooner she’s in her new place the sooner she can get going with the individual rehearsals, for small points after it opens.
Castle decides to leave that can of worms till the morning. He really doesn’t want to think about what individual rehearsal might mean. Ugh. He swiftly puts himself – well, back – to bed and is shortly asleep again, dreaming happily of his Beckett.
When Beckett wakes, she initially reaches for Castle, vaguely remembers him going home, huffs a little crossly that he isn’t there, and then, showered and therefore functional of mind, recalls that she’d thought that it would be good to have a casual pizza or similar with him and Alexis. She’ll talk to him about it later.
The bullpen is nicely quiet. Possibly this is because it’s nicely early. Beckett may not like the act of waking, or indeed of rising early, but she appreciates the space of quiet thinking time before the hubbub begins, and therefore puts up with it. She takes a package out of her purse, and leaves it on the desk, out of her way. Shortly, she is peacefully working through her to-do list.
Castle doesn’t show up till after ten. He is, however, bearing the usual bear claw and coffee. Beckett is suitably thankful. When he plumps down in his chair, he notices the package.
“What’s that?” He pokes it, hopefully. It squishes slightly.
“Open it and see,” Beckett says.
“It’s a present? For me?”
“No, for the bullpen ghost,” she snips. “Yes, for you.”
“Ooohhhh,” Castle bounces happily. “Mine?” He pokes it again. “Not a pony.”
“No. Ponies are usually bigger,” Beckett points out dryly.
“What is it?”
“Open it and find out.”
Castle prods it again, first, just in case it does something unexpected, such as explode, or something interesting, such as make noises, or talk. It doesn’t. He starts to open it.
“Do you like it?” Beckett says, slightly anxiously, as Castle stares at it. He doesn’t answer. “Do you?”
“Uh? Urg. Um.”
Beckett turns back to her papers. Sense is obviously not something she will receive from Castle at present. He’s still squeaking gently and incoherently. She sneaks a peek under her lashes, to try to alleviate her disappointment in his lack of appreciation.
Oh. Oh. He’s actually not capable of speech. His eyes are bright with happiness and suspiciously close to moist. He’s simply staring at his present. Well. Two presents. A small – but slightly squishy – packet of Blue Mountain coffee – and a Georgian recipe book. It appears that she has achieved the impossible, and silenced him.
Finally he looks up from the two items. “I love them. You have to let me practice, though. You can’t come to dinner till I’ve learned to cook some of these. And then we’ll have the coffee.”
“It’s your coffee.”
“No, no. We’ll share it. I’m going to keep it till you come to the loft again and then we’ll both drink it. Better than champagne.”
“But it was for you,” Beckett says, nonplussed. It wasn’t for sharing, it was for Castle.
“And now that it’s mine, I want to share it with you.” He smiles like a child. “It’s my present so I can do what I want with it. You can’t tell me what to do with it.”
Beckett rolls her eyes in despair. Castle grins delightedly and starts to leaf through the recipes, occasionally emitting happy noises or smacking his lips.
Castle is quite overcome – in a manly sort of way, naturally – by his present. It’s so perfectly Beckett. Utterly practical and yet something he’ll love. No fussy frivolity or piece of pretty uselessness, no silliness, but accurately judged to make him smile and warm the depths of his heart. He hums happily and starts to look through the recipes, which are, of course, totally engrossing and look delicious. She’s shared this part of her life: indeed it had been the very first piece of her life she’d ever let him into that didn’t involve tears and hurt and alcoholics. She’d cooked him a Georgian meal and they’d been – she’d been – happy and relaxed and totally Kat for the first time ever out of bed… and now she’s showed him how to cook it when they were in the Hamptons a couple of weeks ago and given him a recipe book and it might look trivial (though the coffee certainly isn’t: that’s expensive) but actually it means far, far more than anyone would know.
He’ll practice, and then when Beckett is able to come to the loft (and he thinks that will be soon, now) he’ll cook it for her, as she did for him. And then they’ll curl up together in his wide bed and in the morning they’ll still be there together, all tangled up as lovers should be.
“Castle!” he hears, in the sort of tone that means Beckett’s been trying to get his attention for the last few minutes. “Come out of your culinary dreams.”
“Uh, what?”
“Wake up!”
He manages to tear his eyes away from a particularly tempting recipe for eggplant and walnuts to look at her.
“Um…” she begins, which after such an impatient recall of him to reality is a touch unfair, “um, I thought maybe we should go for a pizza with Alexis so she doesn’t think Saturday was her fault or that I don’t like her or…”
“Okay,” Castle says, before she can really get wound up. “Tonight? Or tomorrow?”
“Is tonight too soon?”
“No, as long as it’s not late. School night. I wouldn’t mind but Alexis does.”
Beckett is stabbed by a pang of memory of her parents insisting that she was always home by nine on a school night, even when she was seventeen. Castle flashes her a quick, penetrating look.
“It’s okay,” she says, “I’m fine. Just… Mom and Dad used to do that.”
“Mm,” Castle emits, a touch sceptically. He’s not entirely convinced it’s fine, but on the other hand the moment has passed and her face has cleared.
“Tonight,” he says.
“Okay.”
“Because,” he murmurs, “if you don’t have to see Burke on Friday, we could go out on a proper date.”
“Date?” Beckett squeaks.
“Yeah. You know, we go to a movie and maybe do a little making out in the back row” – she makes a disbelieving noise, and he waggles his eyebrows at her – “or dinner and I take you home and maybe we do a little making out there.”
“Or we could skip straight to the making out at mine,” she purrs. “Only teens make out in the back row.”
“No, no, no. I want a date. You do want me to be happy, don’t you?” he adds plaintively, and produces huge blue puppy dog eyes. “It would make me really, really happy to take you on a date.”
He does want to take her out. He wants to do normal things like go to a movie or dinner or theatre just like they hadn’t so far, because so far has been defined by her therapy and her father and the only breaks they’ve had have been in the Hamptons. He wants – well, he wants to bring the relaxed informality of the Hamptons back here to Manhattan.
“If it makes you happy, then,” Beckett capitulates. “If no body drops.”
Castle is delighted, and starts to plot and plan immediately – then has to break off to tell Alexis about pizza and where to meet them. “Bruno’s?” he asks.
“Sure,” says Beckett, from deep in her papers. “Six-thirty.”
The day progresses without anything interesting happening, though after the most recent case Beckett is happy to have a quiet day. Only one, though. Tomorrow she’ll want a nice new case to keep her busy. It also occurs to her that they haven’t seen O’Leary for a while. Hmm. It might be nice for all of them – the four of them here, Lanie, and O’Leary – to go for a drink. By the time they’ve matched all the schedules, that’ll be next week at the very earliest. She realises with some embarrassment that the last time everyone went out was when the boys had collectively staged the intervention on her and Lanie, and breaks off from her papers to text both Lanie and O’Leary. They’ll be hardest. She’ll know the boys’ schedule, she obviously knows hers, and Castle is, pretty much, a free agent. The fact that it stops her fretting about tonight’s dinner is clearly entirely irrelevant. It’ll be fine.
At six-fifteen Castle taps Beckett on the hand to pull her out of her papers. He’s spent a happy afternoon perusing his lovely recipe book, plotting Nikki, and playing with his phone, all the time buoyed up on his feelings about Beckett’s beautiful present. Beckett has been buried in work, and he thinks that she’s more fretful than she’s letting on about this meal. The casual setting doesn’t mean that she’s doing it casually.
“C’mon, time to go.” There’s a tiny hesitation before she shuffles her papers together and taps them into an even mass; switches her computer off and puts everything away; makes a quick trip to the restroom and returns with her make-up pristine. Castle recognises it as a control mechanism and doesn’t comment, though once they’re in the elevator he manages a small brush of hands: finding hers chilly.
Somewhat to Castle’s relief (and from her small exhale Beckett’s relief too) they are there first. Castle had made a reservation, which from the busy, crammed area was just as well. She orders soda, Castle selects a beer, and Alexis’s flaming red head becomes visible through the door just as their drinks arrive.
“Hi Dad, hi Detective Beckett,” she chirps happily. “This is nice. Dad hasn’t brought me here before.”
“It’s always nice to try new places,” Beckett says.
“How was school?” Castle asks, just as he would any day. He thinks that since Beckett wants this to be casual, he’ll behave absolutely normally with Alexis unless and until he thinks that it’s getting too much. If Dr Burke thinks that Beckett need not see him twice a week any more, then she’s so much better that the pace can be pushed a little.
“Okay. I’m so bored with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Nothing but analysis. It’s totally lame.”
“Why don’t you tag along with Grams to watch her directing a few times?”
“Wouldn’t she object?” Alexis says.
“Why?” It’s apparent that Alexis, despite tagging along the other night, hadn’t thought that she might do so again. “She’d probably like the support. Or you could hide up in the circle.”
“Yes?”
“I would,” Beckett says. “Much better to see it on stage, and if you understand what your grandmother is doing when she’s directing you’ll understand the play much better too.” Her voice is pleasant and warm. Castle notices that her knuckles are pale around the soda glass. He also notices that Alexis is just a little reluctant to look at Beckett.
“I still don’t like the concept Carl came up with,” he says provocatively. “Shakespeare doesn’t need messed with. It stands on its own.”
This provokes a lively discussion which keeps everyone away from any difficult subjects or tension until pizza arrives. While Castle wants normality, a debate such as this is part of his family normality, and anyway anything that makes Alexis and Beckett comfortable with talking to each other is good.
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