She called just as he was seriously contemplating whether to pick up the phone and dial her number. He answered on the first ring.

"Missing my dulcet tones already, KB?" he murmured, his phone cradled in the hollow he had formed between his shoulder and his cheek.

"No." she protested, and he could just see the expression on her face.

"You were."

"Shut up." Castle smirked at her response, letting his pen drop from between his fingers as he reclined into a more comfortable position on the couch, running his free hand's fingers through his hair before remembering she couldn't actually see him through a phone call.

"So, you called me because..?" he let the end of the sentence curl off into a pointed silence.

"Just... because. I didn't want to sleep, and sleeping is boring anyway, so I decided to call you because-"

"Because you know that not even the subjects of your wildest dreams can hold a candle to me?"

"No, because I figured out of all the people I know, you'd be the one who was more likely to be awake and less likely to rage at me for calling at- at half past three in the morning."

"You figured correctly, I'm as awake as anything."

"Any particular reason?" she queried, and he heard her yawn over the phone, imagined those long limbs stretching out through the sheets of her bed.

"I was writing. It was a difficult scene, just refused to write itself." he supplied, feeling slightly uncomfortable considering the nature of what he had been attempting to write, but she had asked.

"Nikki Heat being difficult again?"

"More like Rook. I'm used to Nikki being hard to write, but Rook is proving a bit of a challenge lately."

There was a pregnant silence.

"Oh?" she said finally, "Please elaborate." God, when long words rolled off her tongue like that...

"I'm not sure, I think that maybe he just feels like he isn't getting enough back from her to, you know, work with. She's so guarded, and he's not sure how he can get through to her, especially during-"

"Castle."

"Yes?"

"What kind of scene were you writing, exactly?"

"... a sex scene. In an alley."

He could actually feel her rolling her eyes at him through the line.

"Look, they have to do it occasionally, and I can't always pull the 'fade to black' line."

Another long silence, and for a moment he thought she had hung up on him, but then she spoke.

"Have you started writing the scene yet?"

"Not really, a few lines, but not much. Why-"

"One of them needs to make a move." the interruption was quiet, but he stopped speaking the minute the first word left her mouth.

"Both of them think that the other one will do it."

"Maybe Nikki's scared. She doesn't know where it would go, if she started it..."

"Oh, I think she'd know exactly where it would go..." Castle murmured with a quirk of an eyebrow.

"Not what I meant. She's starting to think maybe it runs a bit deeper than she thought it did a first, that it means more than she'd anticipated. She's scared."

"She's scared. Okay, she's scared. So you propose that-?"

"That Rook should make the first move this time," Beckett replied softly, "Even if it feels like he's doing all the work, like it's a one-sided romance, it's not. She'll make up for it later."

"She will?"

"She will." her voice was surer than it had been a few minutes ago, and for a moment he immersed himself in the sound of her, the song of her words.

"Right, then, he makes the first move. He backs her up against the side of the alley-"

"Pushes her up against the wall. Something tells me that when she's not being in control, she likes it rough."

"Pushes her up against the wall, and kisses her."

"How?" It wasn't even a word, the way she said it, more like a helpless syllable that frayed into silence.

"What-?" Castle's brow furrowed, a crease forming towards the left of his forehead. There was another pause that was so incredibly, all-encompassingly silent that it almost consumed him.

"How does he kiss her?" Beckett whispered, less than a whisper, as if she was afraid of both the words she was saying and the consequences of saying them. Castle gasped for air, a fish out of water, before he steeled himself.

"Hard. Hard, open mouthed. They both almost died today and he's not wasting any more time."

"She kisses him back, grabs his collar to pull him in closer, because he hasn't been close enough lately and now that she has him, she can't get enough of him." Her voice steadied about halfway through, and he imagined her telling herself that it was alright, because they were talking about Rook and Nikki. Rook and Nikki.

"This is the bit where I get stuck," Castle admitted, "The bit that feels routine, because Rook and Nikki have done this so many times..."

"Maybe," Kate said, "Maybe he just needs to do a little more research on what she likes."

He inhaled a sharp gasp of air that he desperately hoped she didn't hear. "And- and how would you propose he does that?"

"He could just ask her; she wouldn't mind. She trusts him. She might even tell him that there is a spot, just where her collarbone meets her neck..."

"A sweet spot?"

"A very sweet spot." It was then that Rick started to wonder which kick-ass detective they were speaking about here, because something in her voice changed as the words left her mouth, becoming smoother, more confident. Experienced.

"He kisses his way down from her mouth, across her jawline, sucks down the line of her neck - because even though she complains about hickeys, I think she likes them-"

"She does."

"And then he bites down, just above her collarbone, hard enough to leave a mark, hard enough to bruise."

"Her hands would be fisted in his coat, and she'd try to bite back a moan, but he'd hear it anyway. Then she hooks a leg around his waist, pulls him in tighter, tighter..."

"He'd have to fight the urge to buck his hips then, with her leg wrapped around him-"

"-she realizes that he's holding back, being a gentleman, but she doesn't want that, Castle, she wants him to be dangerous, so she slides her hands down his back and yanks his hips against hers-"

The use of his name hit him like a red-hot bullet, shocked him into the reality of oh my god, what are they doing, how is this happening, but he couldn't stop, couldn't stop if those words kept spilling out of her mouth and down the phone... "She can feel how much he wants her," his voice cracked on the beginning of 'wants', because he does want her, so badly, he's incredibly lucky she can't see him now- "And even though he can't see it at the moment, he is going to find out exactly how much she wants him..."

"A lot. She wants him a lot, so much that it aches, burns, smoulders everywhere that he touches."

"He smoothes his hands under the back of her shirt, spans the skin, soft under his fingers, because he plans on touching her absolutely everywhere very, very soon-"

She didn't reply for several seconds, during which he observed that her breathing had quickened almost as much as his had. The sound of it was almost ragged, and he was completely overcome with the cold hard reality that this conversation was absolutely not about the books anymore-

The broken silence stretched longer.

"Beckett?"

Another pause, and then she spoke. "Castle, I don't think you have any idea what you do to me."

So... what'd you think? Please review, if I get enough reviews there will be another chapter :3