Chapter 16 – The Dinner

"You don't like chopsticks?"

Castle watches Kate pick her bright red lacquered chopsticks up off the little white porcelain rest and then set them back down again. The rest is shaped like a fortune cookie and Kate seems to be amusing herself with the ergonomics of the perfectly apt design, of how it hugs the chopsticks just right no matter how carelessly you place them down.

"No, I like them fine. I just…sometimes I like to use my fingers." Kate shrugs and smiles at him, her cheeks drawn wide, her tongue trapped between her teeth so that just the tip pokes out, torturing him. "Is that weird?" She looks at him slyly, her head tilted to one side when she asks, somehow appearing even younger than her twenty-three years tonight, a fact he finds a little disconcerting.

Castle continues to eye her over his own bowl of grilled Japanese squid brushed with garlic soy sauce. "Depends what you're eating, I guess. Did you eat your ramen with your fingers?" he asks, eyes twinkling with mischief.

Kate mock-glares at him, a little petulant, childlike. "No."

"See," he crows in reply, waving his own chopsticks in her general direction.

"I just slurped them right out of the bowl. One at a time. End to end," she teases, offering him an explanatory sideshow by doing exactly that with a fat, wiggly soba noodle right in front of him.

The buckwheat noodle waggles back and forth as she purses her lips seductively, sucking it perfectly past her chin, not a drop of soy sauce going anywhere. Her cheeks hollow out as she does so sending Castle's mind sliding straight into the gutter.

"Wha—"

"I'm kidding," Kate confesses, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. "I used a spoon."

Castle gapes at her blankly, his face suddenly a shade or two darker in the flickering glow from the red glass, wax filled candleholder sitting in the center of their table.

"For the ramen. This afternoon. I used a spoon," Kate fills in, while Castle's brain takes its own sweet time to reenter the room.

He moves once more, like a robot suddenly rebooted, plucking a cashew nut from a messy tangle of noodles and hovering it midway to his mouth. "Why are we talking cutlery anyway?"

Kate wrinkles her brow and her nose, cute as a Shar-Pei puppy for a second. "Yeah. Are we nervous?" she wonders aloud.

"Is this helping?"

"What? The cutlery talk?" She laughs when Castle nods, his own brow now furrowed by humor. "It's ridiculous enough to be distracting, that's for sure."

"Not exactly sparkling first date talk though, is it?"

"Hmm," Kate hums, contemplatively plucking a shiitake mushroom from one of the sharing plates their have littering the middle of the table. "So…tell me about Alexis. You hinted at some drama earlier at my apartment. Everything okay?"

Castle hadn't decided whether or not to tell Kate about Alexis' little tantrum, but now there seems like there's no way around explaining what happened at home without lying to her or appearing to shut her out. Things have been good so far tonight, after the rocky start when she found out who had helped plan their date. He doesn't want the evening going backwards, so he gambles on her being fine with his daughter's demand for a threesome and decides to explain.

"It's not a big deal really. Oh, you have to try some of this squid, Kate," he says, interrupting himself. "There's enough garlic in here to make your eyes water."

"And…this is a good thing?"

She looks unconvinced, but since she's grinning at him he decides to go for broke, expertly holding a shivering piece of scored, grilled squid out to her between the points of his chopsticks. "It's a good thing if you plan on letting me kiss you later," he murmurs sotto voce.

Kate grins even more broadly, her cheeks warming to a lovely, delicate shade of pink. "I see. And…you think that's on the cards?"

Castle shrugs as if he doesn't really care one way or the other, which is an outright lie for starters. "If you're good."

On hearing this audacious remark Kate laughs loudly and Castle has to steady his hand so as not to drop the precarious piece of squid dangling above the table between them when he can't help joining in. Her laugh is perfect – young and carefree - it chases the darkness he's seen haunt her eyes since the first night he met her clean away. But her laughter is a healing salve to him too. It feels unctuous, enveloping, warm, and yet like a cool compress all at once. It makes him feel giddy, youthful, like all the bad things that have befallen him up to now were just what the are: valuable life lessons meant to prepare him better for the future.

He stares at her face as if he can read the future in her perfect, shiny tiger eye pupils, in her smooth, pale, unblemished skin, in the upward curve of her amused, distracting mouth with those pale, soft lips he yearns to pull promises from. In future. He nails this thought to his inner mast as he flickers his eyes over her mouth once more before she catches him at it or at least calls him out on it this time.

"If I'm good?" she declares, jabbing her thumb at her own chest and bursting his rainbow-streaked, fantasy bubble.

"Just eat the squid before I drop it," Castle insists, aiming his chopsticks towards her mouth.

He approaches the task with care, and it's like the airplane game he used to play with Alexis when she was a skinny, uncooperative baby, sitting up in her highchair refusing his bland, though at least homemade, meals. And now Kate opens for him, her eyes locked on his when he delicately maneuvers the morsel of food past her lips so that she can claim it with her teeth into the soft welcoming bed of her tongue.

"Mm!"

Her exclamation is bawdy, a sinful sound of pleasure that verges on the obscene. It's nothing like the gummy, slapping sounds of approval Alexis used to make when he fed her mashed banana mixed with baby rice, the only food she seemed to want to tolerate at that age. He's mixing memories with the here-and-now, and it's getting to be a little weird. He watches Kate in silence, his eyes skimming from her lips back up to her open gaze and down again.

Eventually he clears his throat, managing a croaked, "Told you it was good," before reaching for a sip of water to moisten his suddenly dry throat.

"So…Alexis? You trying to hold out on me?" asks Kate, taking a mouthful of her own water to dilute the undeniably strong taste of garlic.

"It's nothing really. She threw a little tantrum earlier when I was getting her ready to go stay at a friend's house. She's…she's not normally like that. Uncooperative."

Kate nods her head and then drops it quietly to fiddle with a rice ball, nudging at the little gelatinous mound squatting in the center of her plate. "I see."

She assumes the girl has a problem losing her daddy for the night, that Kate is the cause of the six year old's distress, when the opposite is in fact true.

"No, I don't think you do," Castle explains calmly. "She wanted to come with us."

Kate does a double take. "Where? Here?"

This is Castle's turn to nod. "She wanted the three of us to go out to dinner together."

"What did you tell her?" Kate asks, and then holds her breath for the answer.

Castle winces, uncertain of the reaction he's going to get. "I might have promised we'd have dinner together some other night."

"Right," Kate replies reflexively, taking a moment to process this promise her date has made to his adorable child on behalf of both of them.

"Am I a terrible person?"

"What? For trying to calm your daughter?" She shakes her head. "No."

"It's just…" Castle pauses, looking for the words to explain what he figured out only this morning. He rubs his neck, a nervous tick, Kate now realizes. "She's been drawing parallels between her friend Caitlin—"

"The one who just moved to Williamsburg?"

"Yeah. That's the one. Gold star for keeping up. So…yeah, it seems she's been comparing Caitlin's relationship with her mom and the new boyfriend, Gary."

Kate blinks, thinking she's maybe misunderstood. "Sorry, comparing them to…to us?"

Castle's nod is slow and tinged with misery. "Yes. And I'm sorry I didn't consult you before telling her we could go out together. It was a spur of the moment thing, a kind of verbal pacifier. But she'll most likely forget in a day or two. Don't worry."

Kate takes a deep breath, finding herself on a mission to dispel the sadness suddenly written into the lines of Castle's undeniably handsome face. "Don't be sorry. And I know I only met her once but I'm pretty sure Alexis won't forget your promise in a hurry."

The man beams at her, his features utterly transformed in a heartbeat by her words. The sensation is powerful - a revelation really - that she can make someone else so happy with such little effort.

"They should just forget the exam and make you a detective right away," Castle declares, taking another long drag on his water glass, mightily relieved to have navigated that awkward little choppy patch of weather without capsizing their date. "You," he tells her, enthusiastically pointing his chopsticks, and utterly forgetting his table manners in the process, "are one of the most, if not the most, perceptive people I've ever met. You're totally right. The second I turn up at the Henrys' house to collect Alexis tomorrow she's going to start asking where and when we're all going out to dinner. Kid has a memory like an elephant."

"My favorite animal," murmurs Kate.

Castle smiles that relieved and slightly exhausted smile once more, his gratitude palpable, and all because she offered him some understanding and didn't freak out about something that might never happen.

"Your ornaments. That little tribe you have in your apartment…I remember."

"They were my mom's."

The words trip out of her mouth before she can think twice about censoring them, about what comes after – the questions, the curiosity, the back-peddling on her part, the hurt she knows she'll see in his eyes when she shuts the conversation down, her own awkward pain matched only by his well-meaning pity. She's been down this road before.

But this is when he surprises her again. He studies her face quietly for a second. Her head is bowed over the remains of her meal, and when he doesn't ask the inevitable list of probing questions she's bracing for she hazards a glance up only to find him making some kind of silent resolution with himself.

"Love will draw an elephant through a keyhole," he quotes, drawing an imaginary, invisible elephant on his plate with the tips of his chopsticks.

"I—" Kate looks stunned. "What?"

"Samuel Richardson, the English novelist? He said that. He died on July 4th 1761. I bet he'd never even seen an elephant."

A strangled giggle of relief escapes Kate's throat at the absurdity of her dinner companion's last observation. "Guess not," she agrees, stifling her smile behind her hand.

"You about ready to get out of here? I thought maybe we could get coffee or a drink somewhere else…whatever you're comfortable with."

He's reading her as well as she's reading him, and this restraint on his part – because she does know how pushy and nosy he generally is – intrigues her even more. He's on his best behavior. Maybe it's time to get him to loosen up a little. She doesn't want him too buttoned up. That way no one has any fun.

"Sounds great. Let's get the check," she suggests, deliberately allowing her pinky finger to brush the side of his hand as she settles her arm a little further out across the narrow table. She takes great satisfaction from watching him shiver, full body. Even his hair seems to stand to attention at this gentlest of touches.

The owners of Shuko, Sam and Ana Lee Chang, insist on treating them to a sakazuki of premium Kunshu sake. Kate lifts her small cup first, holding the sakazuki with one hand cradled underneath as she inhales the rich, fruity aroma of the slightly chilled drink before taking a sip and carefully replacing it on the table.

"Perks of knowing the owners? Or a bribe for local law enforcement?" teases Castle, enjoying a sip of his own.

"More like payback for all the paychecks I've spent in here over the last three years," Kate replies, resting her chin on one hand as she looks around the familiar restaurant one more time.

"I can think of worse ways to spend your money. Food was great," Castle says, genuine and generous with his praise. "Though this is the first Japanese restaurant I've been to where they give you these. Fortune cookie?" he asks her, offering up the little dish with two cookies resting in the center so that she can choose her fortune first.

Kate selects the one nearest and immediately snaps the crescent-shaped sugar cookie in half. "You know some people believe fortune cookies were actually invented in Japan. That they come from an ancient Japanese tradition of selling fortune slips at temples and shrines," she informs him as she pulls the little paper tab out from one side and unfurls it while Castle is repeating the same motions on his side of the table.

When she looks up, she finds him smiling at her, an unreadable expression on his face at first.

"What?" she asks, feeling self-conscious enough that butterflies take flight in her stomach at the warmth and the strains of yearning she begins to make out in his eyes.

"Ladies first," whispers Castle a little hoarsely, leaning in closer, both elbows propped on the red tablecloth.

Kate looks down at her strip of paper and starts to laugh. Eventually she's laughing so hard she can't even speak and has to pass the piece of paper across the table so that Castle can read it for himself.

"When hungry, order more Chinese food."

He snorts when he finishes reading these words of profound wisdom. "Kind of betting against themselves with advice like that in here," he observes, watching Ana Lee Chang gracefully serve another customer nearby with a heavy, cast iron pot of green tea.

Kate is still laughing, her smile wrapped around her sake bowl as she sips the remainder of her drink.

"What about yours?" she asks, scanning the table for Castle's fortune when he doesn't immediately offer to read it out to her.

She spots him palm it off the tabletop and then curl his fingers into a cave of a fist with the strip of paper sheltering inside. She assumes the fortune shows him in a bad light. It wouldn't be the first time something unmanly has turned up inside one of the quirky little cookies.

"Come on, Castle. Showed you mine," she challenges, starting to flirt a little more with him now that the sake is kicking in.

He shakes his head.

"Come on. What, is it stupid?" She puts on a dumb voice with a hint of an Asian accent. "You will have unexpected great good luck? Hmm? Is it that? It never pays to kick a skunk? I've had that one before."

Castle shakes his head again and then attempts to distract her by paying the check.

"Hey, I'm splitting that with you," Kate protests, momentarily forgetting the cookie to reach for her purse.

"No way. I asked you out to dinner. This one's mine," Castle insists, risking the audacious follow-up, "You can get the next one."

The check finally paid, they both visit the restroom, agreeing to meet out on the sidewalk since the small restaurant is now busy and more than one couple is waiting by the door for a table.

Kate is already standing out on the street when Castle finally emerges. His hair has been freshly combed, Kate can instantly tell, and she smiles quietly to herself at this flattering act of vanity on the writer's part.

"More lipgloss," he notes appreciatively, reminding Kate that he misses nothing either.

"And you combed your hair," she retaliates, just a little smugly.

"What a vain pair. Guess we're even," Castle suggests, winking at her.

"Not exactly."

"Okay, so I might have brushed my teeth but—"

Kate stares, wide-eyed. "You brought your toothbrush? To dinner?"

"Yes. But no…not because I thought I'd be staying the night or anything. Purely for oral hygiene purposes."

"Oral hygiene purposes?" she repeats, voice heavy-laden with a fine blend of puzzlement and amusement, as if he had just said the long chemical name for DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and then asked her to repeat it back to him. "You couldn't just…like a breath mint or a stick of gum?"

"Now you're laughing at me," he pouts.

"You really want that goodnight kiss badly, don't you? Anyway, we're not even yet because you still haven't shared your fortune cookie with me."

"I ate it inside," he deadpans, thumbing over his shoulder at the restaurant's front window, which is strung with a cheerful row of red, lighted, paper lanterns.

"I meant the message…the…the fortune thing. You know that's what I meant. I watched you palm it like it was the pea in some sidewalk shell game. What's up with that?"

Castle shrugs. "I don't remember what it said. So…where shall we go now? Back to yours for coffee or—"

"Ha!"

Kate surprises him, slipping her hand into his jacket pocket, the one she's pretty sure contains the fortune cookie message.

"Hey!" Castle yelps in surprise, trapping her hand inside.

"Let go. I want to read it," Kate insists, her fingers now closed around the little scrap of paper.

Castle decides there's a little bargain to be struck if he's to allow her to read his fortune. "What's it worth?"

Kate's jaw drops open. "Seriously?"

Castle nods, her hand still trapped inside his, diminutive and a little too warm.

"Need I remind you I'm an NYPD cop. I have a gun," she says brazenly.

"You're threatening to shoot me? Over a fortune cookie?" Castle says this loudly enough that two passersby slow to stare at them in alarm.

He breaks into a grin and then waves them off. "Just a little game we like to play," he tells the couple, who tut in disgust and then hurry on down the street.

"Fine. I will agree to go to dinner with Alexis if you show me your fortune."

"Oh, no. You already agree to that. No deal. I need something else."

Kate splutters. "Just show me the damn thing or this is the last date we ever go on."

She's all bluster but Castle removes his grip on her hand immediately, allowing her room to withdraw it from his pocket and uncurl the, by now, very crumpled, slightly damp and partially smudged strip of printed paper from the warm shell of her palm.

Kate skims the fortune as she simultaneously reads it aloud.

"The love of your life is stepping into your planet this…summer."

When she finishes reading and then doesn't say anything more, Castle takes the piece of paper from her, folds it up neatly and jams it back into his pocket muttering something about "stupid" that she doesn't quite catch.

"Great. I finally meet someone I like and I get upstaged by a damned alien."

Kate's joke wipes the melancholy expression off Castle's face in an instant, only not for the reason she expects. Conspiracy theories, his take on the moon landings ("Of course they happened, but the government covered up the discovery of extraterrestrial life, Kate"), even his love of magic, which he's already shared with her, has her assuming he'll leap on the alien part of her comment and make a wisecrack.

So she's surprised and unprepared when he says, "You really like me?" as if this is an unfathomable truth.

"Well, this is awkward," she mutters a handful of heavy seconds later, kicking the sidewalk with her shoe. "Didn't mean to go all the way on our first date."

Castle stares at her, his face a picture of confusion until Kate playfully nudges his shoulder with her own. "Of course I like you, you idiot. You think I have phone sex with every perp I throw in the back of my squad car?"

"Oh, nice. Bring that up again, why don't you," he grumbles.

"Which part? The sex or your brush with the law?" Kate laughs at Castle's wounded, little boy expression. "Come on. That was funny. And what a great story to tell the grandkids."

His head swivels so fast to look at her she worries it might fly off his neck or give him whiplash at the very least. "You mean that?"

"No," she scoffs unconvincingly. "I'm just trying to cheer you up. Now…coffee or drinks? You choose."

And then she's off, striding down the street like she owns the joint.

TBC…