Richard Castle's stomach reacts to this on multiple levels, not the least of which involves a dramatic drop in confidence levels, as the current state of his union has him accepting the unfamiliar, slim, pale hand and rising to the dance. He almost reaches for the bottle before Beckett's body distracts him: rolling to the pitch, bobbing to the rhythm, her long neck cast out like a plotting line in Magellan's atlas. He thinks, oh god and finds himself dancing to Aerosmith before he knows it.

"Why detective," he says, nicely covering his surprise, "I didn't know that you were the 'writhe-on-the-hood-of-an-old-T-bird' type." His fingers slink between the spokes of her knuckles, jutting her hand up with his, their palms kissing like cousins.