fanofthegenre | [ late night at the precinct ]

Entry tags:

oom,
rick castle

[ late night at the precinct ]

Long nights of paperwork are nothing new for Beckett.

Spending the dull hours of the evening filing away even duller paperwork is a routine she's grown accustomed to; the life of a detective isn't always preoccupied with chasing down a suspect or interrogating a guilty party. Sometimes, there's the moments that aren't always worth writing about, the files she somehow manages to let pile up while she's doing the more exciting parts of her job. It's a vicious cycle, the way the tedious work tends to sneak up on her when she's least expecting it.

Every now and then, her eyes flick to the clock, tracking the time, gauging how many hours she has left to finish what she's working on before she'll be getting absolutely no sleep at all. She's the only one here, apart from the night guard working the desk downstairs, and every now and then she stops to stretch, or to refresh her coffee after fiddling with some of the dials on the espresso machine - the machine that nearly requires a PhD from Starbucks to know how to use.

Sitting back down again at her desk, she rolls her shoulders and then her neck, settling in to wrap up a few last-minute details on the open file in front of her.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Maybe on the bullhorn, definitely not full siren access. You'll get occasionally allotted privileges, time and place to be determined by me."

"But what if we're really in a hurry?"

He moves his hand to her hip, just above the place where her blouse flares out. He has to be careful here. 'Slip of the fingers and he could very well touch bare Beckett skin.

"I promise I'll still have enough time to make that call."

She arches her back again with another noise of contentment.

It's highway robbery, but Castle'll take it.

He folds his hands around her hips, thumbs at the base of her spine, easing the heels of his palms over her lower back. "Smart. Capable. Driven. Resourceful." The timbre of his voice dips with the placement of his hands. "Passionate."

'Edge of his thumb brushes her naked back.

"Sensual."

Twice. It's hardly an accident.

"Sexy."

She's overly sensitized as it is, nerves vibrating like a plucked string, and the combination of his hands on her and his voice, low and rumbling in her ear, is serving to accomplish something else entirely - besides giving her an otherwise impossible opportunity to unwind.

"Castle," she utters, in what she originally intends to be a small form of protest, but in the aftermath, Beckett realizes it had wound up sounding closer to a moan.

Very close to her ear but just out of her peripheral vision. "You're thinking of the Diamond Package," he says.

"Something tells me that doesn't involve the siren."

It's easier, with her eyes still closed, to fall into that relaxing lull. She almost doesn't want to re-open them.

"Give the lady a cigar." He pushes his hands over the tight muscles of her lower back, thumbs in situ on either side of her spine. Her waist is tiny. He could fold her between his palms if he wanted to. "The Diamond Package doesn't involve cigars, either," he says.

"Access to something else, then?"

She knows perfectly well what; the question is posed with the kind of faux-innocence that Castle is fully capable of seeing straight through.

He can and he does, but it doesn't really matter. The banter's slipped into another dimension and Castle's head is heavy and slightly fuzzy. He's glad to have a repetitive task to occupy his hands or else she might just leave him speechless. Imagine that: a mute wordhound. Tongues would wag.

"It's a very exclusive upgrade."

"That's a vaguely reassuring thought," Beckett mutters.

The moments she renders Castle speechless are few, but they do come with their satisfaction. Beckett opens her eyes to peek at the files in front of her and proceeds to groan for an entirely different reason.

"Now all you've made me want to do is go right to bed."

(She hasn't realized yet how her words could be misconstrued.)

His face collects itself into a very curious series of shapes. He must have had an effect on her if she's slipping into innuendoes like that. He grins though she can't see it and gives her hips and spine a final, finishing push with his hands.

"Take the rest of the night. It'll be here in the morning."

She waits until his hands have left her and then stretches slowly, almost feline in movement with the way her back curves and bends in a lazy arc.

"Ohhh," she groans, a low, quiet sound. "Okay."

He gathers his scarf from the back of the chair and loops it around his neck, watching her as she tries out her new mobility. Yep. There's definitely a difference. "You feel okay?"

"Mmhmm."

There's the obvious relaxation, but the flush on her cheeks and her wildly dilating pupils allude to a different, additional kind of effect his hands had on her, and as she turns her gaze up to his face, her reaction is plainly evident.

It's a side effect he wasn't quite prepared for. Sure, the laying on of hands has certain spiritual connotations, but Beckett's got a look on her face that you don't find within ten miles of a church. He tilts his chin down to look at her. Even in her sturdy boots he's got some height on her.

"Once a week," he instructs, a distant reminder of his earlier promise to rent out his masseuse. "Or, you know, more, if the mood takes you."

After a moment, she rises to her feet, keeping her hands firmly planted on the desk while she tries to regain some sense of composure. It's a little easier said than done when he's standing as close as he is and making the comments that he is.

"I need it that frequently, huh?" she asks, glancing in his direction and trying not to breathe too heavily.

"You should be good to yourself," he tells her, tongue and tone as slippery as a greased wheel. "And you know you only have to call."

"Oh, so it's going to be me calling on you, is it? Not the other way around?"

She pushes away from the desk and moves around the chair to stand just in front of him.

"Hey, I'm not the one with ten years of tension riding around between my shoulder blades --" to demonstrate, he starts a 'wave' at the tips of his fingers of one arm and lets it roll all the way through his body to the other side "-- I let go of my hang-ups as often as I can."

"Ten years of tension. Really, now."

She places her hands on the edge of the desk and leans back with a grin.

"In that case, the situation's more dire than even I realized."

"Felt like ten. I'd need a second or third consultation to be sure."

God, are they really doing this? Banter's banter but this is Banter with a capital 'B'. This is verbal sparring two moves away from going to the mat.

"You think you'll get that far?"

It's a matter of toeing the line, testing that boundary to see just how far it'll give before something breaks through.

"What does your writer's intuition tell you, Castle?"

"'Same thing your cop instincts tell you."

"Right now, they're saying that was the last of the work I'm going to get finished tonight."

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