Polly Lynn

Demming is not her boyfriend. Tom is not  . . . Tom Demming is not her boyfriend. For one thing, she is a grown woman, and grown women don’t have boyfriends. They have . . . guys they are . . . seeing—guys whom they don’t know what to call. And if they’re grown women who are also cops, they doubly don’t know what to call them, because there’s the name thing and there’s the label thing. 

The name thing is bad enough. For her, it’s bad enough. For him—Tom. Demming. Whatever.—it doesn’t seem so bad. He calls her Kate with no trouble at all. Over coffee, it’s Kate. When he’s handing her into the cab they’re sharing, it’s Kate. When he kisses her outside the glass door to the lobby of her building, it’s Goodnight, Kate. 

It makes her jump every time. 

She is Katie to her dad, to her overbearing aunts and uncles and cousins. She is—as she’s only just recently been reminded—Bex to the people who knew her before, to the people who mostly bought the act and thought she was cool back in the day. She was, for all too brief a time, Kate to her mom, who at least made the effort in the early days of the most insufferable version of Bex, when she decided she would never again answer Katie. And now she is Kate to Demming. Tom. Tom Demming, who is not her boyfriend. 

To his credit, he calls her Beckett, too. Because he’s a cop. He’s a colleague. He has expertise that just happens to have been relevant to a few of her most recent cases, and that expertise extends to knowing that she’s Beckett at work. When it’s at the board and not over coffee. When he’s holding the door from the precinct lobby out on to the street, and not handing her into the cab they’re sharing—it’s Beckett then. 

It’s probably not worthy of a gold star, the fact that he knows what to call her and when and where to call her by one name or the other. It’s probably not worthy of comment, except that she doesn’t know what to call him. Or, rather, she does. It’s obvious, and even if it weren’t, she has his example to follow, doesn’t she? She knows the what, where, and when of what she should call him, but it doesn’t come easily. 

The tip of her tongue touches the roof of her mouth to make the T in Tom, but it hesitates. It backpedals to a D, and she’s caught up in a Detective Demming spiral at the most inappropriate moments. Or she stalls out entirely, trailing off into something along the lines of oh, you. She tries to make a joke of it—the fact that she trips over what name to call him every single time. He tries to take it that way, but it has to be obvious that neither of his names comes easily to her. 

And the issue of labels is worse. He doesn’t call her his girlfriend. Actually, she does not know this for a fact. But she is of the opinion that he had better fucking not be calling her his girlfriend. She is also of the opinion, if she is being honest with herself (she is not sure that being honest with herself is on the table when it comes to any of this), that the way the very thought of him calling her his girlfriend pegs her rage meter is . . . notable. It is possibly not entirely explained by the fact that she is a grown woman and a cop and she is not anyone’s girl-anything. 

It is possibly entirely explained by Richard Castle and the conclusions he is oh-so-sorry to have jumped to. Despite her stammering—regardless of the wandering tip of her tongue when it comes to calling another man by his name (any of his names)—Richard Castle is almost certainly the one wholly responsible for the spike in her blood pressure as her mind manufactures scenarios in which Tom Demming—Detective Not Boyfriend—might be casually referring to her using the G-word. 

Demming is a Robbery detective, and a good one at that. Demming has a professional network almost entirely different from her own. Demming has perspective on cases that’s different from her own, but rooted in training and actual investigative experience—not wild speculation and a disdain for logic, unlike some people she could (much more easily) name. 

Detective Demming is the man she’s called in to consult of late, and how dare Castle question that? How dare he imply that she would ever—ever—invent lines of investigation, just so that she could see the guy she happens to be . . .  seeing? That guy—whatever anyone wants to call him—is not the guy who gets to write on the murder board. He’s not the guy who gets to tag in on her interrogations.  

He’s the guy who’s been showing up for coffee, who holds doors and hails cabs, who kisses her on the stoop outside her lobby, because they are not at the Why don’t you come up? stage. Not at her place, anyway. Not yet. Or maybe not ever. 

She doesn’t know.  She doesn’t have to know what to call him or when to invite him up.  (If ever.)

And it’s none of his—of Richard Castle’s—business. 

A/N: She soooo wants to deny that Demming is her boyfriend.