[mw] Heal
This was the reason why she didn’t let her guard down.
Detective Beckett was always ahead of the game. She caught wind of a criminal and she didn’t let go until she caught the guy. It was what she was good at, and as a detective, it was what put her at the top of the class. Once she had his or her scent, she didn’t let go. Not until she got what she wanted. A great way to handle herself as a detective-not so great when it came to her romantic relationships.
Kate Beckett, the woman, tended to get burned and often. You weren’t supposed to hound a person into getting what you wanted from them. You couldn’t force them to accommodate your work schedule, or getting called in to go look at a dead body at three in the morning, or just deal with it when you show up smelling like decomp and whatever else when you were forced to chase a suspect through a landfill. She got by telling herself that it was fine. It was just the way things work. Some people got it and some people didn’t.
Detective Tom Demming got it. Granted, he was on the job, and usually dating someone on the job wasn’t the greatest idea, but he was a good, sweet man who treated her well and didn’t care if she smelled like decomp. He made her laugh, and didn’t mind her quirks, and just wanted to be with her. It should have been enough. It was enough. And then Esposito had to open his big fat mouth.
“Can I have another, Bernie?” she sighed, gesturing to the glass in her hand. She had been slowly making her way through glasses of whiskey for the past hour, trying to bleach that moment out of her mind, if at all possible. She had always knew that hindsight had a mean backhand, but this seemed to feel like they had added in a kick to the gut while she was down, and she just wanted the soreness in her ribs to stop for a while. She wanted to stop thinking about how she had made a massive idiot of herself, and Castle probably didn’t even realize it.
She had thought that Rick Castle had gotten it. He followed her around crime scenes like a lost puppy, making stray flirty comments that she tried not to let get under her skin. He was a fixture. Something that she got so used to having around that when he told her he was leaving for the summer, it stunned her in a way she hadn’t expected. And when she tried to get him to stay, or at least let him know that she was on the same page he was, and he takes his ex-wife to the Hamptons for the summer. It wasn’t fair. She was tired of being burned. For once, she just wanted what she wanted. She’d had that-for a little while at least-but in true Beckett fashion, she had to go and screw it up.
“You know, usually it’s the dumpee who’s supposed to get piss drunk.”
The bar was somewhat noisy, and she was surprised that she actually heard him, but when she turned to find Demming standing next to her, glass in his hand as well. She gave him a sheepish smile, before nodding.
“Yeah, usually. Doesn’t mean the dumper still doesn’t have it hard though.” Especially when she gets turned into the dumpee in the span of an hour.
“I’m sure it doesn’t,” he said softly, sitting down next to her and playing with the glass in his hand. She didn’t know how many he was in, but he seemed about on par with her at the moment. He was quiet for a moment, waiting for her to go into her next glass when he turned back to her, seeming a little braver than he was earlier. “It was Castle, wasn’t it?”
“What was?” she asked, downing the rest of her glass.
“What you want right now,” he sighed. “It’s Castle.”
She wasn’t sure what to say at first, but she figured that they were both feeling crappy with themselves, she might as well tell him the truth. “Yeah. It was.”
He was quiet for a moment, giving her a confused look. “Was? From the way Castle looked at you, I would have thought that that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“I was too late,” she admitted quietly. “He is in the Hamptons. With his ex-wife. For the whole summer.”
He was quiet for a moment, before reaching over and covering her hand on the bar. “I’m sorry, Kate.”
She shrugged. “I guess I just read the signals wrong.” She paused, looking at her glass again. “And I really want to drink.”
“Mind if I join you?”
It was a bad idea. There was a tiny voice in the back of her mind told her that that was a bad idea. Maybe not for her, but definitely for him. But the bigger, louder voice that was mostly fueled by alcohol and her being hurt told her that she didn’t want to be alone more. She watched the bartender refill her glass before nodding.
“Yeah. Sure.”
***
She stumbled back into the wall of his apartment, one hand reaching for purchase on the wall, while the other was focused on getting his shirt off his shoulders. He tasted like whiskey and peppermint and it was familiar and good, even though it wasn’t what she really wanted, she was capable of pretending for a while. It felt good to not be alone.
His lips moved down to the slope of her neck, hiking her up further against the wall so that he was pressed flush against her, one hand trailing down over her thigh and hooking it over his hip. It wasn’t a bad fit. There weren’t any spaces, it didn’t feel awkward, and she wasn’t sure if that was the booze or something else, but at least for this particular moment, Rick Castle was the last thing on her mind.
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