This was also cross-posted to ff.net here
“I want to taste her lips
Yeah, ‘cause they taste like you
I want to drown myself
In a bottle of her perfume
I want her long blonde hair
I want her magic touch
Yeah, ‘cause maybe then
You’d want me just as much.”
-Girl Crush by Little Big Town
She watches from the shadows, a broken woman yearning for the touch of a lover. But not just any lover, no. She wants Castle, wants his broad arms wrapped around her slender frame and his lips on her skin. Instead, she’s done something to ruin the progress they were making, has halted their forward momentum and sent it hurling backwards. Something, but she has no idea what. And now she watches from the dark shadows that have fallen across the New York night, watches as the fun and uncomplicated blonde screeches Castle’s car to a jerking stop and scurries across the street to his loft.
Jacinda is different. Nothing that Kate would peg as Richard Castle’s type after knowing him for four years. In the beginning, perhaps the curvy, flaunting blonde is exactly who she would have expected him to leave the precinct with, but not now, not after truly knowing him.
Castle has surprised her more often than not, but this behavior, it’s too much like he was in the past and it hurts, god, it hurts. So she remains where she is, hunched in the darkness, a privacy that the large building she’s leaning against provides, while she watches all of the things she could have had disappear on the fleeting movement of a flight attendant.
Who knows how long Kate stands there, watching, waiting and desperate for a different ending to this story. But the longer she stands there, ridiculously alone, she knows that the pen has already scribbled its words across the paper, that the ink has already confirmed that her chance is gone.
And then the sound of heels clicking across the pavement alerts her to the sight she can hardly bear to witness. Long, blonde hair whips violently around the face of the flight attendant as she makes her way back across the street. The wind dances across Jacinda’s exposed skin, forces her to adjust her already twisted red dress as she sinks into the driver’s seat of a car that doesn’t belong to her.
Her scent fills the space around her, sweet perfume sweeping across the shadows and surrounding Kate, drowning her in it.
Jealousy builds, flooding its way through every vein in Kate’s body until she’s burning with it, desperate to eradicate the feelings coursing through her. She stares at Jacinda, yearns to be everything that the woman is, because she knows her lips taste like Castle’s, knows her skin is painted with the scent of him. And maybe if she was blonde and flaky, fun and uncomplicated, Castle would want her just as much as he wants Jacinda.
Maybe he would still be waiting for her.