Material Witness-Summer on Your Skin (2 x 24, A Deadly Game)
Title: Material Witness-Summer on Your Skin
Rating: K+
WC: ~2200
Summary: "He buys it on a rainy day long before he even asks her. Before it ever comes up in any serious way. Serious on his part, though she doesn't seem to realize it. Sometimes he thinks she's working pretty hard not to realize it. Other times her cool dismissal seems honest enough."
Spoilers: Set primarily during A Deadly Game (2 x 24)
A/N: Second story in this series prompted by the diabolical berkielynn. If you missed it, here's the prologue that sets up the series premise, and here's the first story. They're loosely linked one-shots that can be read independently and in any order you like
This gift suggested by the reality that as the Serbo-Croatian uber-hybrid, Stana has a moral obligation to bring hats back into fashion. I'm just doing my part.
2010
He buys it on a rainy day. Cold and blustery and unseasonable. The kind of day that makes summer seem like a rumor. The kind of day he usually hates, especially this deep into spring.
He loves summer. The long light and the way it bakes into the city sidewalks. Heat rising up from the pavement, deep into the evening. He loves the sighs and half-hearted complaints as it twines around bare ankles. Coaxes people into the streets and invites them to linger.
Later, he loves leaving the city behind. Usually, he loves that. He hasn't always, though.
Just out of college, he couldn't bear it. Too many summers spent trailing around after his mother through nowhere summer stock towns, the ruins of one year behind him, some new unknown gaping ahead. And in between, nothing after nothing after nothing-towns and plays and people whose names he barely bothered to learn.
So he stayed in the city those first few summers. Drank in the heat and fed off the energy. Loved the anonymity and the driving pace and the fierceness of it all.
He bought the first Hamptons house on a whim. An impulse to have something-to make something-for his daughter. A counterbalance for Meredith's grand plans and dismal follow-through.
It was a pit. A tiny pit with bad insulation and leaking pipes and iffy wiring, but he loved it. They both loved it, and it was everything they needed. A kitchen and a couple of bedrooms to tumble into, exhausted from long days on the beach.
He loved it and hated to see it go, but it was time. Paula had been bugging him about it for a while. Some mixed metaphor about dressing for the house he wanted. But it was really about Alexis again.
There came a point when they couldn't just go to the beach any more. He couldn't just let her scamper off with some other family, thinking she'd made a fast friend made in the space of one afternoon. Too often they'd both find at the bottom of it a weekend wife more interested in chatting him up and not ashamed to use her kid to make it happen. Privacy was something they needed all of a sudden. Privacy and space as his little girl doggedly insisted on growing up. Growing into her own person. He could buy that for them, so he did.
He loves the second house, too. The one he has now. He loves it in a different way. It's over the top. Too big and too much. It satisfies the kid who slept on dressing room floors in stuffy theaters, the air thick with the scent of cheap flowers, fading fast.
But he loves the quiet, too. How quiet it can be and the way he can shut the world out. He loves all its cavernous spaces in their infinite variety. The way he can just pick up and move from room to room, never seeing another soul if he doesn't want to. A change of scenery when writing makes him restless.
He's always loved the potential for solitude in that house. Now he worries about loneliness.
He buys it on a rainy day long before he even asks her. Before it ever comes up in any serious way. Serious on his part, though she doesn't seem to realize it. Sometimes he thinks she's working pretty hard not to realize it. Other times her cool dismissal seems honest enough.
It's ridiculous. And beautiful. It's not a vintage piece, but it could be. It captures that certain something from the forties. That perfect blend of masculine and feminine-whiskey-colored straw in a tight, stiff weave with a brim wide enough to droop just a little at the edges. A red grosgrain ribbon around the deep, softly curving crown, bright and warm as a poppy. Gorgeous.
It comes in a bandbox. An actual bandbox-glossy black and white vertical stripes and a smart handle of black braided silk. It's ridiculous and it delights him.
He lies to the sales lady as she places it on a bed of tissue. She drops the lid on and taps it in place. She compliments him on his taste and asks about his special someone. He lies to her. Says it's a joke-his daughter is thinking about abandoning him for the summer and he wants to give her a taste of what she'd be missing. A taste of sun and cool, salt-scented night air.
The lie comes easily, though he's not sure how. He's not sure how when he can see her in it. When it's all he can see. The brim dipping low over her forehead, giving shelter to her skin while the sun climbs high over the ocean. Blotting it out to throw half her face in shadow, leaving him with just the crimson swell of her lower lip to savor. He sees her tipping her head back, one elegant hand pressed to the crown as she drinks in late afternoon. As she welcomes the cool evening.
He sees her pulling the brim low. He sees her laughing at him-always laughing at him. One brow arched in challenge. One dark, dark eye giving off sparks.
The lie comes easily, but then he's in trouble and he has to hurry out of the store, the box dangling from his fingers and bumping his thigh as he stumbles out into the rain. The image takes him. He sees her in it. He sees himself manhandling her into his arms and kissing her senseless. Kissing her until she relents. Until she melts into him the way women always do in the movies.
He doesn't mind the rain the day he buys it. Summer seems far off and he's fine with that. He's fine with the idea that it might not come. That he might not leave the city. He might not leave her. She might come with him.
It must have been there from the start. The thought, buried in the back of his mind. From the first moment he followed that red ribbon around and around with his fingertip. The thought must have been there. That he might ask. That she might say yes if he did.
He asks.
She's humoring him about the whole thing. Or maybe she's not. Damned if he knows anymore. He asks anyway, with his heart in his throat, climbing and climbing when she doesn't say no. When she spins it out into one tease and another.
He asks again. Makes a promise that he doesn't think he means to keep. She says no then, but it doesn't sound like she's saying no to him. It doesn't sound like no at all, actually.
Later, he slides the bandbox out from under the bed. He lifts the lid and sees the scene play out all over again. He's in trouble all over again.
He wonders what he's doing. He runs his fingers over the brim and wonders what she's doing. What she's doing whispering with Demming and not really saying no.
Unless she is really saying no and the rest of it is all in his head. It's a possibility. He hates it, but it's a possibility.
He tells himself he's angry when it all comes out. Angry is better than mortified, so that's what he tells himself.
He doesn't believe it, though. Himself or her.
He's too hollowed out for anger. It blazes up now and then and dies in the empty, airless places inside.
And when has she ever spared him? When has a woman like her ever spared a man like him? Not that there are women like her. Not anymore.
He doesn't believe her, but he doesn't have a better answer, so he'll go. He'll write and purge himself of her and learn to believe the lie. His or hers, it hardly matters.
He thinks about his own lie. The other one. The one he told on a rainy day. He thinks about making it true. He thinks about giving it to Alexis with a flourish. Loading her arms up with the enormous box and laughing as she pulls it out in a burst of tissue paper. He thinks about telling her she can change her mind any time.
But she's already worried that he might be lonely and he won't do that to her.
He is lonely and there's nothing for it.
But he doesn't give it to her. He doesn't make the lie true. Either one of them.
It's somehow in his hand when he goes to unearth the suitcases from storage. It's in his hand and then he's pulling down boxes and cases and furniture. He makes a hollow there-an empty place that waits-and he slides the bandbox in. He walls it back up again and goes.
He goes.
2013
She always packs the car because he's hopeless and she's tired of having to iron everything all over again. She's also tired of late night runs to the store for things he left sitting somewhere in the loft. So she packed the car this time like she always does and she really has no idea where the giant box came from or how he made space for it.
He plays coy. He dances it away from her, leaning back to kiss her shoulder as he makes his way past.
"If you left any of my clothes behind to make space for that . . . "
He stops on the doorstep and whirls around. The box spins and winds the handle around his fingers. It hovers a minute and unwinds, rocking back and forth.
His mouth drops open in consternation. "I wish I'd thought of that. Then you'd have to walk around naked."
She means to fix him with a hard stare, but he's already banging through door and charging up the stairs. And anyway, she's grinning. He's back a minute later "helping" her bring in the rest of their things, but his hands are all over her and it takes them forever to get things situated.
It's not really a beach day. Summer is taking its time arriving in New York. It's hazy and a little cool and they got a later start from the city than they'd intended. His fault again. Totally his fault.
She slips into her bathing suit anyway. She doesn't need the sun so much as the ocean air on her skin and time to just be.
He's disappeared somewhere in the house. God knows there are plenty of places to disappear. She slips her arms into a long cover up, scrounges up a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses, and slips through the glass doors out on to the porch. He'll find her.
She plants herself on the top step. He'll fuss about her being uncomfortable. About the endless parade of outdoor furniture she has to choose from. But it's not worth the trouble of dragging the table and chairs from the porch out on to the slope by herself.
And anyway the breeze is even sharper on this side of the house, though the sun is doing its level best to burn through the thin clouds scudding across the sky. This is close enough for now. She shivers pleasantly and sips her wine and watches the afternoon slip away.
He finds her before too long. She's leaning back on her palms, eyes closed and her face tipped up to the sky when she feels his shadow fall over her.
"You're in my sun, Castle," she says lazily, eyes still closed.
She senses him bending over her and arcs her chin up, anticipating a kiss. Instead, he settles something on her head. Her eyes snap open and her breath catches when she meets his eyes.
He's staring at her, awestruck. Light and heat underneath. She shivers again, head to toe, and a sharp comment dies on her lips. "Castle?"
"Gorgeous," he breathes and he reaches for her.
He pulls her up. Hauls her against him with rough, awkward hands on her spine, her shoulders, her neck. It's so clumsy and urgent she wants to laugh as he tugs her head back and she claps a hand to the top of her head. Then his lips are on hers sand it feels like the world turns upside down.
They break apart, breathless, and his forehead bumps the brim of the . . . hat? The hat, she guesses.
"What was that?" she murmurs.
"Mmmmm. Something I've wanted to do for a while." He runs a thumb over her cheekbone and he has to stop looking at her like that or they're not going to make it back into the house.
"You have been doing that for a while," she laughs as she turns in his arms.
"Not long enough." He wraps his arms around her waist and ducks to fit his cheek against her shoulder. He watches as she studies her faint reflection in the glass doors. "Never long enough."
She runs a fingertip along the brim. Tugs it low on her forehead and tries out an exaggerated pout. "Castle, this is . . ."
"Gorgeous?" He nuzzles her neck.
"I was going to say ridiculous," she says faintly as she reaches a hand up to his cheek and presses closer.
"That, too," he grins. "That, too."