37. Rest against my shoulder

“I can get the subway home,” Beckett says, as soon as they exit the building.

“I’m taking you.” Castle replies inflexibly.  He follows up with a hand on her shoulder that doesn’t give the impression it’s likely to let go.

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“No,” Castle says amiably. Clearly that wasn’t what Beckett was expecting.  She looks like a stunned codfish.  “You don’t.  But you do need company, so I’m taking you home.  Or I’ll meet you there, but it’s cold out and my car is warm and right here, so why would you want to walk to the subway, wait for a train, and walk from the subway home, getting cold, when you could be chauffeured home in cosy comfort?”

While he’s talking he’s walking them to his car, opens the passenger door for Beckett, and gives her a gentle prod to encourage her to get in. When that isn’t effective – or possibly isn’t noticed through her coat – he encourages a bit more forcefully, and as is becoming common when he’s assertive, she goes along with it, sitting down and automatically doing up her seatbelt.  He shuts the door, gets in himself and pulls away, heading for Beckett’s apartment.  She doesn’t talk, all the way there.  Nor does Castle.  Talking will wait till they’re inside.  Preceded by some very physical comfort.

Inside, Castle doesn’t hesitate for an instant before wrapping Beckett into his body and cuddling her in. His hand cradling her head into his shoulder has the happy side-effect that she can’t complain at him.  Yet.  He aims them both at the couch and sits them down comfortably.  Well, he’s comfortable.  Beckett is rather more tense than he’d like.  He pets gently, not making his earlier mistake of forcing hard truth upon her when she’s already unreceptive and angry.  Challenging her in that upfront way when she’s trying to save someone – however undeserving that someone might be, however much she’s reinforcing all her self-destructive patterns of pouring out herself instead of working out what the basic problem is – was stupid.  Not that he was alone in his stupidity: Lanie seems to have made the same mistake, probably repeatedly, this week.  He might want to force her to confront her issues, but it isn’t actually going to fix them.

She had said it, after all. You can’t save them unless they want to save themselves. You can only save yourself.  Right now, she doesn’t see that she needs to save herself, still less that she should want to.

“Now, Beckett, just stay here and snuggle in.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You should go home.  I’m sure your family would like to see you.”  She tries to unfold from him. 

“Stop wriggling. They’ve seen me at dinner and I’m not needed.  Mother’s out and Alexis is at a friend’s for the night.  Come back here.”  He tucks her back in, and hangs on.  “Now,” he says again, “are we still going to talk to your dad tomorrow about seeing Julia?”

Beckett’s surprise at that turn in the conversation is shown through her sudden loss of rigidity. It’s obvious she was expecting him to go back to the earlier fight.  He takes advantage and snuggles her in further, tips up her face and drops a teasing peck on her nose.

“Are we?” he asks again.

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?” Castle asks innocently.

“Stop pretending you care about anything other than fixing me.  You only came back to force me into talking” – she might as well have said torturing small animals – “so stop pretending there’s anything else.  Go home.  I’m fine.  You can try tattling on me to Montgomery if you want.  It won’t work, and I’m not going to be blackmailed by you.  We have nothing to talk about.”  She tries to break out his hold again.

“I was angry with you. You just went running straight back into the pain, and we’d only just agreed that there was a different way.”  He stops.  He doesn’t want to say I hate seeing you hurt. I hate it that you suffer. And I hate that you could fix all this if you’d just listen to why you’re doing it and then get help, but you don’t.

“So what should I do? Let him be lost, maybe let him die of hypothermia, because I might get a bit upset?  You don’t get it, do you?  We sign up to protect people, not give up when the going gets a bit tough.”

“No. I know.  I’m still angry, though, even though you couldn’t do anything else, could you?”  He sighs.  “I don’t know if I’m angry with you or the situation or both.  But you can’t keep on like this.  Right now you need to stop and stand down.”  He shakes her gently.  “You’re supposed to be off-duty.  Come here, and stop.  For now.  Later, we’ll see about everything else.  O’Leary can manage perfectly well without you.”  He’s gradually pulling her closer and closer.  “He seems like a pretty competent guy.”  He’s managed to pull her up on to his lap, where he likes her; where he can cosset her in and try to retrieve the situation. 

If he wants to retrieve the situation, that is. He considers whether actually he should precipitate the explosion and then try to sort it out.  It would be very easy.  All he has to do is repeat his conclusions as to why she’s using herself up and trying to push everyone away, and watch the bomb go off.   But there’s another huge assumption, right there.  He’s assuming that she’d allow him to be anywhere near her afterwards.  That’s a mistake.  She wouldn’t.  So it wouldn’t sort anything out at all, and he’d be in an even worse position than he is now.  And so would she.

He keeps her embraced, and leans his head on her hair, a softly affectionate gesture. “Stand down, Beckett,” he murmurs again.  He pets her a little, nothing sexual, coaxing her to relax and forget the failure of their search.  He can feel the tension still coursing through her, her gaze still skittering around her soulless apartment, as if she’s still searching frantically for an escape route: but her body isn’t pulling away from him.  Her body never has, when she’s like this, only her mind.

“Did you call your dad?”

“When?” she snips. “Never got a chance.”

“You could do it now. It’s not so late.”

“Suppose so.” She doesn’t move.  Castle hands her the phone.  She stares at it as if it’s alien tech that she’s never seen and can’t operate.  He curves her fingers around it so that it doesn’t fall to the floor.

“Beckett? You don’t have to.”

“We decided,” she says emptily. “No point putting it off.”  She swipes her phone on, and taps a speed dial key.  Terrifyingly, as she does she recovers full Beckettness and when the call connects is bright, breezy and cheerful.  It’s possibly a good thing that it isn’t a video-link, though.

“Hey, Dad. I got something and I thought you could help me out with it.”

“What, Katie?”

“Well… it was Castle’s idea really…”

“Oh, yes? Should I expect surprises?”

“Er…” she runs out of words.

“I’m intrigued, Katie.”

“Dad, can I come over tomorrow and talk to you?”

“Sure, but why can’t you give me a hint now?”

“It’s a bit delicate.”

“Do I need a shotgun?” Castle splutters very loudly.  “Is Rick there with you?”

“Yes, Dad,” Beckett says resignedly, casting Castle a sulphurous glare. “Well, he can tell me, then.  Pass me over.”  Beckett doesn’t, not amenable to parental pressure, and also unwilling to let Castle have a free hand with suggestions.  The whole situation is far too near the knuckle right now.  

“No, it’s fine.” Castle glares in his turn.  She puts the phone on speaker.  “There’s this couple.  Their son was murdered before Christmas.  He’s… he’s drinking too much.  She needs help, and she won’t listen to me.  Castle thought” – she’s basely putting all the responsibility on him – “that maybe you could talk to her.”  She stops.  There is dead silence on the end of the phone.  “Dad?”

Terror rises in her gut. “Dad?  Talk to me?”  There’s a strangled breath on the end of the phone.  Castle’s grip has tightened on her, nervousness apparent in his fingers.

“Really?” her father wheezes. “You want me to talk to her?”  He pauses.  “I think you’d both better come round tomorrow.  I’ll see you at ten.  Night.”

“Dad?” But he’s gone.

“What just happened?”

“I don’t know,” she says slowly. She stands up.  “I think you should go home.  I’ll see you at Dad’s at five to ten.  You remember where it is?”  She moves to her desk and scrawls the address on a scrap of paper.  “There you are.”  She comes back to give him it.

Castle doesn’t stand up, doesn’t take the scrap of paper, and doesn’t answer the point about going home. Instead he reaches out, places his large hands round Beckett’s slim waist, and tugs sharply once to land her back in his lap.

“I don’t think I should go home. You’ll fret yourself into flinders.  Then you’ll stay up too late and sleep in and I’ll be left at your dad’s all on my own and unprotected.  He said he had a shotgun, and if you’re not there he’ll aim it at me.  You can’t do that to me.”

Beckett looks almost familiarly irritated at his nonsense. He tucks her in more closely.  “See?  Human shield.”

“My dad is not going to shoot you,” she points out. “But I might.”

“Then who’ll protect you from your dad? I won’t be able to.”  He pauses the flow of persiflage and pets some more, warmth and affection in each stroke.  “You know,” he says slowly, “it’s funny, but if I had to guess I’d have said your dad was trying not to laugh at you.”

“Laugh?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

Beckett doesn’t probe further. Her father’s behaviour has left her scared and shaky, regardless of Castle’s thoughts.  She’s not at all convinced that she hasn’t just made a major tactical error and pushed him beyond his comfort zone.  What if tomorrow he’s hung-over, or worse, wasted?  She’s held him together for so long, what if she’s shattered him?  He’s been so very fragile.  If he falls, it will be her fault, her responsibility: she’ll have pushed him past his limits.

Castle notes Beckett’s tension rapidly overwhelming her and wonders why she’s so ready to assume her father’s weakness, when it’s so obvious that to resist his resident evil, his addiction, he must be incredibly strong. He’d said it: he’s said no every hour of every day and she’d – it’s clear, now – not believed it then.  She doesn’t believe it currently, either.  He decides on distraction, not a small amount influenced by his own wants.  Petting, which had not actually stopped at any time since he pulled her back down on to his lap, becomes a little more intent, less of a pat and more of a stroke.  Still providing affection, but rapidly being coloured by seduction.  His soothing strokes become longer and slower; lingering as his fingers drift down the edge of her face, slipping over her shoulder to caress her arm and, not incidentally, encouraging her to relax into him.

It takes a long time to ease her down. Beckett seems to have been frozen by the risk she thinks she’s taken.  He wouldn’t quite say she was shivering, but she feels in his arms as if the absence of motion is through sheer force of will.  He tries to infuse his warmth into her, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect until he’s wrapped her in so tightly that he can sense each shallow breath that she takes.

“Stand down,” he murmurs in her ear. “Leave it all up to me.  You know I can give you what you want.  All you need to do is decide yes or no.  After that you don’t need to think any more.”  He drops a tiny, teasing, insinuating peck on the sharp-cut side of her face, and she turns into it.  He takes it as an invitation.  The next kiss lands on her jawbone, then he tracks across her cheek to land at her lips.  “Yes or no,” he entices.

“Yes,” she breathes, and he replies immediately, wordlessly. This communication needs very few words. Yes, and please, and more, and mine, and yours: that should be plenty.  His mouth can communicate very nicely without words.  Very active lips and tongue, and possibly even teeth, but no words. 

He kisses her deeply, forcefully: soft lips under his already surrendering to his leadership, yielding and easing and then ceding to him. He easily takes charge, readily asserts a little authority and lets her fall into his sensual web.  His hand runs into her hair, re-angles her skull for perfectly slanted access not only to her full mouth but to the curve of her neck and the nerve that will complete her accession to his will; his other hand drops from her arm to her leg.

Castle’s fingers are still on her thigh, stalking her surrender to desire, little points of heat blossoming under her skin and skittering along her nerves. She opens a little under his soft pressure, and shifts to curve into his hand more fully.

He teases lightly: tip-tapping barely-there touches, a little frivolity, playfulness rather than hot intent or focused desire, shifting the mood towards pleasure and pleasing, mutual give and take instead of anger or dark unhappy undercurrents of sadness and unspoken, unrecognised resentment. A space of light and happiness, harbinger of warmth in her chilly life.

He has no illusions that this will last.

Beckett allows herself to give in to the promise of warmth and strength implicit in Castle’s body, curls a little further inward and strokes into the soft short hair at the back of his neck. She seeks the heat in his body to dissipate the ice in her own; the temporary passion and promise in his lips to defeat the knowledge of the future.  She might as well have something good, while it lasts.  While he lasts.  He’s already trying to make this more, ignoring her warnings, trying to force her into the mould of his assumptions about families and happiness and how things should be.  It can’t last, it can’t work; and soon enough he’ll make one assumption too many, and go.  He’s wrong, anyway.  She has forgiven her father.  She has.

At least he knows – oh, he really, really knows – how to do this, just as she likes, just as she wants.  He wants her, and if she can’t have love she’ll settle for his lust.  He’s smoothing delicately powerful strokes over her spine, encouraging her to stand down and be soft Kat (not that he knows about Kat, she thinks) who simply likes peace, serenity and calm, vague colours with no hard edges: Kat who doesn’t have to shoulder any burdens and can forget about steel-strong Detective Kate Beckett who is all hard edges.  Only for a small space of time, only here under the passion and power and potency of the hands and mouth and body of another.

She only needs this one night, she thinks, forgetting that this week alone he’s been there with her some part of every evening, starting with the night she spent with a solo shot glass and deep-chilled vodka till she could glue her eggshell personality back together again. No need for the King’s soldiers or the King’s men here.

She forgets all of that, that it’s become not just a series of nights but every night; forgets the looming visit to her father yet to come; forgets it all in Castle’s broad hands on her back and leg, soothing and then warming, trailing little ripples of desire across her. She emits a contented little noise and he keeps stroking to bring her ease and relaxation; to leave her boneless and lax against him and surrounded by his scent and indefinable sense of masculinity.  She’s never been feminine, except here where he makes her so.  She is, now, quite definitely purring.

“Like that?” he entices. “ Let’s do some more of what you like.”  His deep sable baritone surrounds her and seeps into her skin, heating her from the inside out.  He opens a button, and another: all the way down, eases her shirt from her pants to settle his broad palm under the silky fabric.  His fingers search and find the catch of her bra; opening it confidently to slide around and over her ribs.  He removes her shirt in one polished move, her bra with a second.  This is sheer seduction, and she is surely seduced.  She presses into his palm, and he moulds gently, flicks a thumb softly over the peaked nipple, kisses her mouth hard and then bends to flutter down her neck and over the curve.  She’s breathing harder, making sexy little noises of encouragement as he plays mobile lips over her and then draws her into his mouth and it feels so good.  She pushes more demandingly, and pulls his head closer.  He turns to the other side and repeats his attentions and oh, she could be taken all the way just from this: more Castle.  And he does give her more: plays and presses, licks and sucks, strokes and nips and she’s sky-high, writhing and moaning and not caring how she sounds, how desperate she is, as long as he doesn’t stop.

He doesn’t stop. She loses all sense of time and place, only aware of him and how he makes her feel, and then loses all awareness entirely.

“There,” Castle growls, “that’s better. Now, let’s try even more things you like.”  He simply stands with her still held against him and carries her through to her bedroom.  He strips her pants from her, disposes of the majority of his own clothes with alacrity, and leaves her watching him as he prowls towards her.  She expects him to remove her plain cotton panties, but he doesn’t.  Instead he uses the fabric to slide over her, the friction driving her up again.  She reaches for the hard length against her hip, to try to drive him wild as he is her, grips and slides and suddenly it’s hot and frantic and she’s naked and he’s over her and inside her and three hard thrusts and she’s all gone.