138. Let me entertain you

Since she’s there, and her mouth is opening on something that’s sure to disconcert him – she’s done so for the last quarter-hour, anyway, so she’ll no doubt do it again – he bends his head to take control of her lips again, his hands at her waist tight enough to keep her close. “No more messing, Beckett.” One hand runs smoothly up her spine, the other smoothly over her ass. He kisses her again: exploring slowly, sensing her fight back to try to conquer him, but that’s not how they roll; he easily overcomes her campaign and takes total possession. His totally badass Beckett, his Kate, his softly melting, boneless Kat.

Beckett runs her hands into the soft short hair at Castle’s nape and holds him to her, slipping into the pool of sexuality where she can simply be Kat-who-doesn’t-need-to-stand-for-anyone and allow herself simply to be and enjoy. She grips him more tightly and presses into him, rolling her hips a little until the discarded pants get in the way. She kicks them off and away, and brings a leg up round him to be closer, to rub against the hard length and hot pressure and take what she needs while giving what he needs.

His earlier words float back through her mind: anywhere we want to go. Together, Beckett. That’s where we’ll be. Despite all her issues and difficulties and troubles and her father… She kisses him harder and surrenders to their joint desire, falling into his assertive masculinity without a single hesitation, and murmurs mine into his mouth. Her Castle, her place of safety, and her love.

She glides a hand round his jaw and down to try to release the fastenings of his shirt, and fails to find so much as a sliver of space for her fingers to fit into. She emits a disappointed mew, and feels Castle’s quick smile on her mouth.

“No, no. You’ve had your fun, and now I’m going to have mine. I’ll lead, Kat. Just relax and stand down and let me, now.”

She growls, but gently, and skims her hand down to his excellent ass, purely to prove that he can’t have it all his own way. Castle catches her wrist, and repatriates her naughty fingers to his shoulder. “Uh-uh. I’ve got this.” He nibbles under her earlobe, and pours syrup into her ear, dribbling it down her nerves. “Let go. I’ve got you.” His fingers play seductively and slither briefly and teasingly between her legs. She gasps, and arches against him, and her grip bites into his shoulders.   He knows just how to play her body and he’s very keen to do it: to prove his virtuoso command of her reactions and pleasure. He can practice as much as he likes – ohhhhh. Definitely. She stops trying to assert herself and lets Castle assert himself, falling into everything he can and does do for her.

Her shirt is mysteriously off. Castle’s mouth is very unmysteriously exploring all the ways he can make her gasp and whimper simply by teasing at her breasts and sliding the fabric of her bra over proud nipples, dampening the fabric with his mouth and there are surely – ohhhh Castle – direct nerve connections from her breasts to her core and every single one – ohhhh – of them is in synaptic overdrive right now. She’s bent back over his arm despite there being a perfectly good bed right there but something about being held in that position and completely available to him is very, very erotic. She is reminded that Castle is, in fact, much stronger than she normally remembers, and right now all of that strength is encompassing her.

Her bra falls away, and Beckett is suddenly tumbled on to the bed with Castle following, the fabric of his pants rubbing slightly roughly between her legs, an arm over her, and propped up on his elbow to regard her with the dangerously predatory gaze that tells her that he’s in the mood to take. This is fine. She’s quite happily in the mood to give.

“Mine,” he growls, and after that there is no more talking. Castle possesses himself of her mouth ruthlessly, strips her panties in one swift move, and proceeds to leave her mindless and writhing: he’s just a little rough, a little forceful, and she gives herself completely over to the moment and the movement and simply him within her and around her and over her.

After, she turns into him and lies over his chest, breathing coming a little faster still: but with the sound of his heart under her cheek, holding him to her, or her to him.

“Could we do brunch again, Sunday?” she blurts out, feeling Castle startle under her. “My treat this time.” Castle tenses, and doesn’t relax. Silence descends heavily about Beckett, who, after a few seconds, tries to roll off. That had clearly been a dumb idea.

Rolling off doesn’t happen. Movement, in fact, does not happen. Including the necessary rib movement to allow breathing, which is a little disconcerting and shortly discomforting. She solves the latter problem with an elbow to Castle’s midriff, which allows her to suck in air.

“Sorry,” he says distractedly, having noticed that she is bluish-purple and wheezing.

“I’m told breathing is essential,” she snarks. “Maybe you could let me try it?”

“If you must,” Castle says, the lazy note in his voice belying the forceful grip around her. His arms loosen only just enough to allow unhindered breath. Beckett has another try at rolling away. “Stop it. Stay here.” She doesn’t say anything.

“You want to host brunch?”

“Not here,” Beckett says very hastily.

“No. I didn’t think you meant here.” There is a pause. “Brunch, fine. But you don’t pay, I do.”

“No. My invitation. I pay.”

“I wanna pay. There’s three of us and only one of you.”

“No. I pay or no deal.”

“But…”

“No buts. Why are you so keen on paying?”

“Erghhhhh…” Castle emits, which is less than explanatory or indeed helpful.

“Spill. You don’t get to say I don’t get to pay” –

“That rhymes, Beckett. You’ll be a writer one day – ooff!”

“No way. I get to pay. Stop making dumb noises and explain why I shouldn’t. Logically.” Castle humphs and pouts. Beckett regards him with a fearsome glare. “Talk.” It’s her full-on interrogation voice.

“I wanna pay,” Castle says again.

“Explain.” This voice would summon the Devil to explain himself. He’d be cringing as he did, too.

Castle has one, tiny, titchy problem here. He doesn’t have an explanation. He has nothing, except a vague feeling that Beckett should let him pay. He is very aware that this will not pass muster.

“I should,” he stutters. “It’s what I’m supposed to do.”

The Beckett eyebrow elevates. “Supposed?” she says glacially. Castle has never seen anyone project so much menace when naked and draped over him. Right now, her nakedness has no good effect on him at all. All his – er – assets have retreated in abject terror. He musters a modicum of nerve.

“Supposed,” he says firmly. “I’m your partner and that means if I want to pay for things I get to.”

“How does that follow?”

It doesn’t. Castle knows this. This is not fair. Beckett should be sex-hazed and sleepy, not wide-awake and outthinking him. He essays a stroke down her back.

“You can’t suborn me with sex.”

“Drugs? Rock-n-ro – ooofff!”

“You’re avoiding the issue. I have invited you and your family to brunch. That means I get the check. Capisce?”

Castle opens his mouth, receives the full force of a glare that would have levelled the Rockies from end to end, and shuts it again.

“Now, are you going to come or not?” Castle detects, however, considerable uncertainty, as opposed to the rock hard certainty of the previous statements.

“Of course. Is that why you’re trying to escape? You thought I wouldn’t?” He pats her backside, a little chidingly. “Silly Kat. Of course we will. Now stop running away from me.”

He pulls her up and kisses her. Annoyingly, Kat is now Beckett and declines to be kissed.

“And do you promise you won’t even try to pick up the tab?”

“But…”

“Promise. Or no brunch.”

There is no wiggle room in that statement. There is no wiggle from Beckett either, which is disappointing.

“Promise,” Castle says, very sulkily.

“I’ll let you know where it is. Ten on Sunday?”

“Okay.” He’s still sulky. He should be allowed to buy her things. He’s positive that’s in the job description. And if it isn’t, it should be. He humphs.

“Stop sulking. You’re not three.”

“No, I’m not. But you’re not being fair.”

“How am I not being fair? It’s my turn. You’re not being fair.”

“But I want to. You never let me do what I want.”

Beckett’s eyebrows hit her hair. “Seriously?”

Castle smirks. “Gotcha,” he says. Beckett emits a noise reminiscent of an angry tiger, and then another as she finds that being wrapped in also means that she can’t take revenge for that annoyance. Castle smirks more widely, and since she’s right there, kisses her too.

“Time I went home,” he points out.

“Yep.” Now Beckett sounds sulky.

“I’ll – we’ll – see you Sunday.”

“Yep.”

Castle inserts himself into his clothes, and then turns back to the bed. Beckett has inserted herself under the covers and a massive pile of pillows. He sits on the edge and disinters her from them so he can kiss her some more, before taking his leave. He’d almost swear he heard a very quiet love you as he departs, which is only fair, because that’s the last thing he’d whispered in her ear too.

On his solitary way home, in a late-night cab with a don’t-care driver whose don’t-careness extends to stop signals, give-way lines and speed limits, Castle fails to notice the several near-death experiences as he contemplates Beckett’s invitation. He’s still a little sulky that she won’t let him pay, but as he pulls his brain into gear that’s rapidly being displaced by the full ramifications of her words. She’s asked his family to brunch. The previous times, he’s asked her. Okay, so it’s not at her home, but still – she’s really trying, still, despite all the difficulties with her father: she’s still trying to progress both sides of the problem at once. Baby steps, but steps forward.

Beckett is pondering choices. She had been pondering the choice of brunch locations, but that dealt with in her usual efficient fashion and the location provided to Castle, who had answered with a simple okay with us, she is now pondering other choices.

Specifically, she is thinking over the choices she had had ten years ago, and for five years following; and more specifically, her father’s words. Once I started drinking there were no good options for anyone except me – and I wasn’t ready to take the only good option. You hadn’t any good choices. She could choose to try to pull him out of the swamp, or she could choose to walk away. Enable, or ignore. She’d tried both, and neither had worked, but there hadn’t been another choice until, five years gone, he’d done it himself. Then, she’d had another choice. Go to him, and hope; or ignore him further. She’d chosen to go to him, and – she remembers her own joy – he had been her Dad again. Dr Burke had told her how her father had felt – had said he’d felt: she was the only thing he had left to love. Her dad had said you came and it was as if the lights went back on.

Every iota of her considerable investigative and interrogative ability is telling her that her dad was speaking the absolute truth. Everything she knows of the infuriatingly brilliant Dr Burke tells her that he – arrogant, annoying asshole that he is – is telling her the absolute truth. And there is no question, not now, not ever, but that Castle is telling her the absolute truth.

All the truth is out there, if only she listens to it.

All the choices are hers.

But here and now, it’s a simple pair of choices. Listen, or not. Forgive, or not.

She’s already chosen to listen. Now she needs to choose whether to forgive. It doesn’t mean, she knows, that she will be able to do so soon, or easily. That’s not the point. The point is the decision.

Two decisions. To forgive herself, and to forgive her father.

The first is very easy. The answer to the first is yes. Always and for ever. Because she finally has a reason to try, and it’s not her father.

The second is not so easy. Saints might find it so, but she is not a saint. So much pain to forgive, so many broken promises and so many ways he broke her heart, and broke her. She’s not that naïve nineteen year-old, now, nor yet the twenty-four year old who thought that everything would be okay because her dad got dry. She’s not the girl who needed him to love her, either.

And yet. Forgiveness is not a commitment to anything more. More may come, or it may not, but that’s a decision for another day. She has a sudden impulse to invite her father to brunch, but doesn’t act on it. Small steps, carefully taken. Adding the strain of her father’s presence to the massive strain of seeing Castle with his family is not sensible, tomorrow. It’s best, for now, that their meetings are moderated. Before she takes any irrevocable steps, or puts herself in a position where everything could rapidly fall apart – before she watches Castle’s family swallow up her father and leave her behind because she can’t keep up, not yet – she needs a firm foundation.

She doesn’t yet have a firm foundation. All she has is a decision to make. One last choice.

And thinking that, her decision is already made. To try to forgive: herself, and her father. No more – and no less.

Sunday morning, at nine forty-five, Beckett is ensconced in the café she’d chosen for brunch – nothing like Balthazar, but she doesn’t have an unlimited budget either – and is downing her second double espresso. Not that she’s nervous. Oh no. She’s terrified. Mostly, she’s terrified of Martha. She is not at all reassured that Castle had lost it with his mother, though he hasn’t mentioned it since so either he’s patched it up or he’s ignoring the problem, but it doesn’t exactly give her the feeling that she will not be pecked at or chipped at or generally encouraged (ha! That’s one way of putting it) to appear at the loft. The caffeine really is not helping. Maybe she should add whiskey.

No. Never. Never ever.   Alcohol is not a coping mechanism, and even thinking that shows that she was absolutely right not to add her father to the mix. She’s far too stressed already even without that. She orders a third double espresso, and peruses the menu with white knuckled grip.

A minute or so after ten a fluster of noise and kerfuffle indicates the arrival of the Castle Circus. Beckett blinks several times at the costume parade. Castle is tidy in his favourite blue, Alexis perfectly proper in normal teen dress. Martha – well. Eye-watering orange, which would probably guide ships every inch of the way from their leaving port in Ireland to sail to safe harbour in New York, decorated with green curlicues. Ow. Her eyes may be bleeding.

She’s so blinded by the costume – all it needs are sequins but if she looks hard and doesn’t go blind first she might spot some – that she stops being quite so nervous. She manages to stand and greet them, put on a semblance of good humour at Martha’s attempt to embrace her and splatter her cheek with theatrical air kisses, and ignore her following comments as Castle discreetly does not do the same. Beckett does not do social kissing. It’s not a cop thing. It would be utterly ridiculous if they all hugged and kissed every time they met each other. Ugh. On the other hand, Espo’s face if it were ever suggested…

The humour of that thought carries her through Martha’s effusive greetings, Alexis’s teen bounciness (at least in that, she is quite definitely her father’s child) and Castle’s rather more contained salutations; and even on into discussions about everyone’s brunch orders, and the actual ordering of the brunches.

Castle keeps conversation light, unstressful, and well away from any subjects such as families, therapy, visits to the loft, and indeed anything deep and meaningful. It’s just a shame that Martha fails utterly to pick up the hint.

“It was so sad that we missed you at the weekend,” she starts. Castle winces. Alexis casts a bewildered look from her father to her grandmother, opens her mouth, and then winces and shuts it hurriedly, with an even more bewildered look at her father, who is trying to speak. Martha talks right over him. “It would have been lovely to see you, darling.”

“It was a brief visit,” Beckett says. So it was, compared to, say, her visit to Kiev, which had lasted three months. Castle presses against her knee, unseen. “I had to get home to be ready for work. Castle kindly made me dinner.”

“Oh,” Martha says. “There do seem to have been a lot of murders recently. You shouldn’t skip meals, Katherine.”

“I don’t,” Beckett says, with the beginnings of an edge to her tone. “Castle cooks well, so I was quite happy to eat his cooking rather than mine.”

“I think Beckett can take care of herself, Mother. She’s managed it this long.”

“It’s nice to have someone looking after you.”

Beckett tenses.

“I wouldn’t know,” Castle says.   “I spend my time looking after you. I provide a home, food, wine – you raid my best wine constantly – all the comforts you need.”

Beckett watches with interest as Martha pales slightly and rapidly changes the subject, which remains on topics of general interest such as incompetent politicians, Hollywood scandals and the iniquities of Martha’s newest co-stars and directors in her off off-Broadway play.

Beckett settles the check, explains generically that it’s her turn seeing as she’s been invited twice and she was given dinner last week, closes her ears to Martha’s commentary on letting men pay for one’s meals and waves everyone goodbye with a huge sigh of relief that she only just manages to keep covered until they’re out of earshot.

She strongly suspects that she will receive a call from Castle, who is unlikely to be in a good mood, within the hour. She also strongly suspects, from Martha’s reaction to a perfectly ordinary comment, that Castle’s loss of temper the other day had involved a flat statement to his mother reminding her that the loft is his and that she lives there on his sufferance. Suffer being the right root word, at this point.

Anyway. She made it. Another small step. She even leapt the Martha maelstrom. It’s working.