35. ThirtyFive: Saturday

Thirty-Five

Kate wakes to the sunlight pouring into her bedroom through the half-opened blinds, as if in jubilant disregard for the aloneness she finds herself with. Empty sheets, the too-cool pillow, the distance of miles.

She shakes off her existential mood and slides out of bed, pressing two fingers to the slats to push the shutters closed, blocking out the early morning. She gets back in bed and curls up on her side, staring at the unused space that should be his side.

Her phone rings to the sappy disco strains of 'Let's Get It On' and even though she's never heard the ringtone before, never put it into her phone, she knows it's Castle. His doing, him calling.

She answers with a grin she finally feels and hums in greeting.

"No way. Seriously, you are not just waking up."

"Yeah," she gets out, closing her eyes and resisting the urge to snuggle into the pillow that would be his were he here.

"It's nearly eight o'clock, Beckett!"

"So sue me."

He laughs, rich and redolent in the digital expanse, too rich really, for what digital is capable of, and she knows it's all in her head, how she feels about him coloring the tones and tenor of his voice, but wow, she loves him.

She really loves him. She is in love with him to the degree that makes his voice more meaningful and his side of the bed, well, his side of the bed.

"Castle, before you say anything more. Take the day. Today. Take Alexis to a movie or a museum or the park. Do family."

"I can do family with you-"

She sucks in a sharp breath-

"Too soon?" he smirks. She knows he is smirking; she can hear it.

"Do family without me today. I want to accomplish something. I have all this time on my hands and I'm starting to feel wasteful and sloth-like. I need to accomplish-"

"Being with me is an accomplishment. Ask my - ah, ask anyone."

"Uh-huh," she says, feigning the disapproval because really, he's probably right. His ex-wives might have no idea what they've given up, but good riddance and thank you God, fate, the universe, because here they are. "It is an accomplishment. I do know that - I'm the one with all the issues in this relationship, Castle, so don't worry. I get it."

"You don't have issues, just endearing characteristics that-"

"You might want to be careful. You almost told me to ask your ex-wives about you, and now you're-"

"I'm only complimenting your passionate nature. I love your passionate nature. It's highly arousing."

She does laugh at that, her head a tangled mess unable to get back to the original idea. What was it? Oh. Something about the morning light illuminating all her empty places.

"I'm serious, Castle. I want to do something with my time that means good for other people. So first - you and Alexis."

"Ah, I see. Alexis and I are on your to-do list. Got it. You could come-"

"No," she says quietly, and he's quiet back, listening to the things she isn't saying, the thing they haven't discussed at all because it's a little too much like being his family and they both know they aren't there yet. They will be, sure, but not today.

Alexis doesn't trust her; Alexis is trying, but fundamentally, his daughter thinks Kate is going to hurt him.

And Kate can't exactly say she won't. They will both do some hurting; it's the nature of relationships to know all the places and ways that hurt. It will happen.

"Okay," he says finally. "What will you do?"

"Read a book," she says on a content little purr.

He laughs, then sobers when he realizes she's serious. "No. Not-uh. You do not get to throw me over for a book, Kate Beckett."

"I thought you liked that I read."

"I do. Just not instead of me."

"I have mountains of books next to my bed, in my bookcase, that I've picked up over the last six or seven years but have never gotten a chance to start, let alone finish. I want to do at least one of those today."

"Start or finish?"

"Yes."

He sighs dramatically. "Fine. Go accomplish something today."

"Call me later?"

"How later is later?"

"Not in an hour, Castle."

"Darn."

"After dinner."

A chuckle on his end and she knows what he's thinking.

"No. After seven or eight. You do not get to claim 'old man' and eat dinner at four."

He does laugh then, hard, and she smiles wide to have put that laughter in his voice.

A glass of red, late afternoon light turning the bathroom amber and gold, her phone silent and being good (Castle being good, really, and not calling) on the little table next to the tub.

She draws a bath and sinks down into the hot water slowly, letting it circle her body and surround her, a line of ever encroaching heat along her skin. She leans back against the cold porcelain of the tub, wincing at the contact before warming it just enough to relax.

Kate closes her eyes, skims her fingertips along her thigh, feeling the lotion melt away, soft and silky in the water. She rubs her hand against her neck to dry it off a little, then reaches for the book.

She has a stack of paperbacks next to the bed, hardbacks in the bookcase, an odd assortment on the wooden stairs leading up and out to the roof garden, but she chose this one earlier this morning. She's not sure why. Okay, well, a book about mystery and love isn't really a huge leap for her, but she wonders why now.

Still she opens the book at her bookmark in the middle and begins to get it done. Accomplish at least this today.

But of course, as always, she finds herself drawn in, living the story rather than reading the words on the page.

She's pulled roughly out of the novel by I've been really tryin' baby, to hold back these feelings for so long and she lets it go on just to hear the chorus, and if you feel, like I feel, baby, come on, oh come on, and let's get it on-

She snags the phone and closes the book against her wet chest, not even caring, the dustjacket somewhere in the floor.

"Hey," she gets out, and her throat is too thick to mask it, despite the soft smile that ringtone brought to her lips.

"Hey. Oh, you're crying."

She takes in a long, deep breath but it doesn't help much. She puts her chin to the top of the book. "Yeah."

"I'm sor-"

"It's okay. Sometimes it's exactly what needs to happen in a story as good as this one."

He makes a little sound, exasperation or curiosity or something. She hasn't managed to catalog all of those noises yet. He's still revealing them, slowly, as if unwinding his layers of onion, one thin skin at a time.

"What book are you reading that's making you so sad?"

"I'm not so sad, Castle. It's a story. And sometimes stories can make me cry."

"You're not re-reading Time Traveler's Wife, are you?"

She laughs at that, presses her thumb against the bottom of her eye to catch the steady stream of tears that still leak out. "No."

"Then what book?"

She lies, because she isn't sure he really ought to know. She searches for the last novel that did make her cry and lands on- "A Tale of Two Cities."

"Oh, yeah. That's a love story, really. Pretty remarkable, the power of love. But Kate?"

"Yeah?"

"Spoilers?"

She smiles to herself, because she's read that Dickens novel before and she knows how it ends. "Yeah. Spoil away."

"He dies for love, for her, but she's okay. She makes it."

"Because he doesn't really die for love, Castle. He dies for her love, for the man she loves. She makes it because she still has the man she loves, and he dies in that man's place."

"Crazy, isn't it? It's so very unselfish. I don't know-" Here his breath hitches and it hits her suddenly what they're inadvertently talking about. "I don't know, Kate, that I could be that unselfish."

"You've saved my life how many times? I don't know how you can say that."

"Those were all supremely selfish."

"I don't follow."

"I love you. I don't want you to die. Of course I'm going to save your life. But Demming's life? Dr. Motorcycle Man's? Never."

She likes that he's so confident about her, about them, that it's Man and not Boy. She smiles into the phone and feels her tears dissipating, the knot in her throat unwinding and sliding away. "I don't love Demming or Josh. So you'd never have to save their lives for me."

"Whew, good. Because I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it anyway."

"But Castle?"

"Yeah?"

"I think you could do it; I think you already have loved me pretty unselfishly. I think that's what kept me. . .going. The idea that I'd have you in the end, if I could just hold on long enough."

He just breathes over the phone, and she knows she's surprised him, knows they don't talk like this exactly. Sometimes after a case, it's oblique references, but here she's laying it all out. And she isn't only talking about needing to hold on to the edge of that roof.

"Hey, also?"

"There's more?" he gets out, half-humorous but his voice a little cracked.

"You never have to worry about saving anyone else's life - but I do love you. Would you save your life for me?"

He lets out a quick, ragged breath. "Yes. Yes, of course."

She blinks and picks up the book she's been reading. "Castle, I'm not reading A Tale of Two Cities."

"You're not?" he asks, and she can hear the question about her lie.

"I'm reading Heat Rises. And I'm at the end." Rook in the hospital, in a coma, Nikki his silent and ever-watchful ghost.

"Oh," he says slowly, a long and drawn out thing that ends with his sucked-in breath of realization. "No. Kate-"

"You promised me," she says quietly.

"I didn't know what I was promising." She knows he was thinking something along the lines of her father's alcoholism or her own obsession with her mother's case - should Castle ever become addicted to something, she could cash in his promise. But that's not what she meant.

"But you did promise."

"Kate-"

"I don't - it won't happen, Castle. It won't, not now. That part of my life is over. But if you do something that ends your life in order to save mine? I will never get over that. I will never be right again. So if you love me, you won't do that to me. You'll save your life for me."

"Don't do this to me on the phone. I can't even touch you."

"You sound like I'm breaking up with you," she half laughs, trying ease the moment.

"Because you are. You've tricked me into promising to save myself instead of you, and I will never be okay with that, Beckett. You think you won't be right after that? I wouldn't either. Knowing I had the opportunity, the chance, however slim, to keep you alive but I stood there-"

"Because you promised. You promised."

"Kate."

"You promised," she says again, even though she knows it's not fair.

"It's the only promise to you I will ever break," he swears, and she knows it's true. Knows that it's a promise as well.

"But it won't happen," she says finally. "You'll never have to - it will never happen. Because I'm out, Castle."

"Yes." She hears the finality in his voice, hears that he finally gets it, why she has to be done with that life in order to have any life at all. "Yes. You're out."

"It will never happen."

"It damn well better not happen."

She wants to say, It won't, but that's a promise she can't make either, because it shouldn't have happened to her mother, but it did. It did. And Kate Beckett, much as she would like to try, cannot control the universe.

"Let me finish my book-"

"And finish crying," he says gently, overriding her voice. "Yeah. I see. Good night, Kate."

She hangs up without saying anything more because the tears are already back, and she opens the book because it's the excuse she's needed to mourn whatever life she used to have and can no longer hold on to, not if she loves him.

Castle unlocks her apartment door with the extra key he took out of her kitchen drawer last week, or the week before, one of those times when they were here together. He took it and he isn't sorry for it.

He sheds his shoes, socks, unbuttons his cuffs and rolls the sleeves up his forearms. He stops just outside her bedroom door, but takes a breath and opens it. Still in the bathtub, apparently, but that's only natural. He just hung up with her not twenty minutes ago. He could not let that be their good-night.

He eases into the doorway of the master bathroom, watches her in the dim light. No bubblebath, not today, just the distortion of water and the lovely shadows of her body above and below, the dark hair piled on top of her head with the streaks of sun-lightened strands curling around her face.

From this angle, she could be a deep-sea mermaid hanging on to her fins, to the sinuous and broad muscle of her lower body rather than a woman with two legs.

The book is on the floor, the tears have dried in faint impressions of streambeds and channels on her cheeks, and her arm is over one side of the tub, fingers stretched down to the book as if reaching out for something she can no longer achieve.

She sighs and lifts her head, her eyes still closed. "Castle."

"Yes."

"Come here."

He walks into her bathroom, leans over to stroke his fingers through her hair, tangled, his touch making it fall apart and around her face. He gets to his knees beside the bathtub, wincing at the cold tile, pushes his damn book farther away from them.

"I love you, Kate."

She opens her eyes and there's no trace of sadness, none of the emotional blackmail she leveled on him only a few minutes ago. He leans in and presses his lips to the dried up course of her tears, traveling down her cheek until he meets her mouth.

She's salty and warm, her lips two soft fingers touching his, waiting for permission or warning or both. He slides his palm down to the back of her neck and parts his mouth, letting the wet slide of his lips make her promises he intends to keep forever. Better promises. Promises of love and not death.

Her breath catches, a wet hand comes to trail down his neck to his shirt, clutching, the damp heat finally arousing. He touches his tongue to her mouth, explores the seam that refuses to part for him until he's managed, somehow, to wordlessly convince her that even though there's a promise he can't keep, the others will make up for it.

She must finally believe him, or she's done with withholding herself from him, because her lips part and she's allowing him inside, and her body is arching up out of the water and pressing into his chest, and he captures it, that slick and wet body, pulls her towards him and they hang there, caught, two creatures unable to bridge the difference of their worlds.

She grows legs then, lifts one out of the water to wrap around him, awkward and off-balance, but he drags her out of the water and manages to stand. She chuckles into his ear and it magically erases the last hour's conversation entirely because she is worth it, worth all of it, the issues, the broken promises, the terrible things and the good things and the days it won't be so great and the nights she wakes him up or doesn't even though she should.

"Castle, get moving before I freeze."

He laughs back, finds her mouth for a heat-inducing kiss, warming her thoroughly, and then carrying her out to her bedroom to make love to her.