He Touches Things

"Castle," she barks out. "What did I tell you?"

"I'm just observing, just observing." He hastily backpedals, eyes wide.

"Observing does not involve touching," she glares at him.

"Do you not know me?" he mutters.

She pushes the wooden spoon through the sauce simmering in the skillet and ignores him, shaking her head even as she lets her mind get caught up in the recipe once more. She's recreating it out of thin air, really, based on what she remembers from her teen years spent standing in almost the exact same spot Castle stands right now, looking over her mother's shoulder.

"You're not gonna do something crazy like add cinnamon, are you?" he asks.

Johanna used fennel, that was it. Or wait. Maybe just celery seed? "Cinnamon is for meat loaf," she murmurs absently.

"What?" he gasps.

Kate blinks down at the stir fry combination in her skillet, frowns. "To give the pumpkin a little kick."

"Pump-" Silence. And then. "Ohhh, you are amazing. Seriously? That's why it's so good. You don't use apple sauce, you use pumpkin pie filling."

"Yeah." She shrugs. "My mom did that."

Castle makes a little moan behind her. He's warm at her back and if he puts his hands on her hips, maybe, instead of trying to take the spoon or taste the mix of seasonings, she'd be okay with that kind of observing.

Celery seed and. . .oh, right. Now she remembers. Garlic salt.

She taps a little more into the sauce and feels his breath on her cheek, closes her eyes a moment at the rush of sensation down her spine.

"You think that much garlic? Because-"

She grunts and elbows him back, turns to narrow her eyes at him. "Richard Castle," she growls, points to her living room. "Go. Over there."

He slumps his shoulders and backs away from her, holding his hands up in surrender.

She huffs and returns to their dinner on the stove, gritting her teeth because, okay, darn, she might have gotten a little caught up in the feel of his mouth so close and dumped in more garlic than she meant to, but that is his fault too.

"Observing, my ass," she mutters.

"Oh yes, that too," he says fervently.

She jerks around to look at him with a bubble of laughter on her lips, her mouth open as he gives her a wide grin from the threshold of her kitchen.

"But at least I get to touch that. Right? You wouldn't take that away from me, would you?"

She rolls her eyes and points to the couch, and he goes, but he's still giving her this cheeky little grin like he knows.

Of course he knows.

How could he not?

She adores his hands on her.

It's only when she's back at his loft, nearly eight days later, that she realizes just how alike they really are.

He's making her his specialty cabbage rolls, an old Polish tradition handed down in the family (whose family, Castle?) for years. A guy I know, he glares at her, and then he bans her from the kitchen when she mentions that her mother put brown rice in the meat - not white.

They are so much alike.

She likes to be in control and so does he. They just do it differently.

Her control came as a kind of structure that she closed down around her personality, a way of securing herself against any future nasty surprises after her mother's murder. She couldn't control the things that happened to her, so she controlled her. Herself.

Castle, on the other hand, must have experienced a lot of turmoil in his childhood - an actor's schedule, the summer stock theatre in various parts of the country, the long and vibrant nights during a run in the city, and then all those boarding schools.

She remembers him saying he got kicked out of nearly all of them, except the last of course. Damien Westlake's intervention and guidance, and whatever and however else that man is twisted, at least he did this one thing right: he showed Rick how to take back control of his world through words.

Words. Castle literally remakes the world around him.

When life wasn't fair, when tragedies got too close, when nothing made sense, he must have gone straight to his own world. No wonder she soaked in his stories like sunlight, no wonder every word made her feel like he knew her, knew exactly what it was like, exactly how to fix things.

Because he was doing the same thing.

She sits stupidly on his couch and hungrily observes him in his kitchen, making them dinner, puttering around and at home, and she can't help but love him.

She controls herself.

He controls the world.

And oh. He touches things.

"Mm," Castle hums, curling up at her back and nestling his face down at her neck. "Totally making you cabbage rolls again if that's my thank you."

She huffs and lifts her hand to his cheek, strokes the side of his face, scratches into his scalp even as he turns his head to kiss her wrist. She draws her arm back and drops her hand to the mattress, a little boneless, a lot sleepy, and feels him relaxing into her, pressing her down.

He really likes to touch things.

And that's a way of controlling his world as well. If he touches it, he discovers it, he knows it, he owns it, he controls it.

Yeahhh, she likes it when he touches things. Uh-huh. Very nice.

"You're still grinning," he mumbles at her spine; she can feel him smiling in response. He yawns widely and she shivers at the rush of heat, the wash of his breath, feels his fingers stroking her hip.

"Can't help it," she sighs, giving him that. "But I'm freezing. Pull up the-?"

He's already reaching for the sheet at the foot of the bed, a little grunt as he moves, dragging it and the comforter back up with him, settling now just at her side. She lies on her stomach and turns her head to look at him in the relative darkness of his bedroom.

She shifts a hand out and lifts a finger to stroke his nose, sees his eyes flutter open on a questioning little smile.

But she doesn't have anything to say when it comes down to it. She doesn't have words. She just traces the stark edge of his nose, the lines spiderwebbing from his eye, the deep curve in an open parenthesis at his mouth - a parenthesis waiting for its clause, so much better for the wait.

She doesn't have the words he has. She can't rebuild his world with a novel or even an eloquent speech fighting for his life, but there is this one way.

He touches things. And so can she.